The understanding of soil behavior during the last 300 years has centered on mechanical principles, geological processes, and later on, mineralogy and the relevance of colloidal chemistry. More recently, research in biology and earth science has enabled important advances in understanding the crucial involvement of microorganisms in the evolution of the earth, their ubiquitous presence in near ...

Benford’s law predicts the frequency of the first digit of numbers met in a wide range of naturally occurring phenomena. In data sets, following Benford’s law, numbers are started with a small leading digit more often than those with a large leading digit. This law can be used as a tool for detecting fraud and abnormally in the number sets and any fabricated number sets. This can be used as an ...

The finite-element (FE) method is widely recognized as a powerful tool in modeling structural and geotechnical systems and simulating their response to static and dynamic loads. In addition, numerical optimization is commonly used in many engineering applications, such as structural reliability analysis, FE model updating, structural identification, and structural optimization. This paper focus...

John S. McCartney received BSCE and MSCE degrees from the University of Colorado Boulder and a PhD degree in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. McCartney’s research interests include unsaturated soil mechanics, geosynthetics, and thermally active geotechnical systems. He has received several research awards, including the NSF Faculty Early Development (CAREER) Award i...

Blast-induced seismic wave is very important to theory study of structure damage and stability analysis of corresponding geotechnical engineering; however it is not well solved. Based on measured data of Lafarge quarry, shortcoming of traditional analysis method is pointed out. Wavelet analysis method is presented to describe spectral characteristics and energy distribution of blast-induced sei...

1 Pedro Lamas, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, [email protected] Abstract The Bologna Process assigns new challenges in higher education and in geotechnical engineering courses in particular. The ECTS (European Credit Transfer System), based on the student workload required to achieve the objectives of a program study, implies reduction of contact hours between tea...