Short Courses

Sunday, March 25, 2012

ESTIMATION OF SOIL PROPERTIES FOR FOUNDATION DESIGN

7:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. (full-day course)

Instructor:

F.H. Kulhawy, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University

This course is a much-expanded version of the well-known "Manual on Estimating Soil Properties for Foundation Design" by Fred Kulhawy and Paul Mayne. Engineering and geologic professionals around the world have had the opportunity to benefit from the technology covered in this consistent, coherent, and practically-framed course.

Soil property estimation is fundamental to all of geotechnical design. On large projects with relatively generous budgets, all of the required field and laboratory tests can be conducted to evaluate the necessary geotechnical properties for design. For all other projects, testing will be more limited, and some properties will have to be estimated using correlations. Under the sponsorship of EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) and other funding agencies, significant research has been conducted at Cornell University to assess soil property correlations in a realistic manner, including the uncertainty in each correlation. If you experience this course, you will be among those who benefit from these research efforts since the results are not yet available in traditional types of reference sources such as texts and manuals.

You Will Gain Knowledge About:

  • Soil property evaluation strategy.
  • Geologic inference in property assessment.
  • Comparative evaluation of in-situ tests.
  • Relative density assessment.
  • In-situ stress evaluation.
  • Soil strength evaluation.
  • Deformability estimation.

 

ADVANCES IN GEOENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING: SOIL, GROUNDWATER, AND SEDIMENT REMEDIATION

7:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. (full-day course)

Instructor:

Krishna R. Reddy, Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago

The field of remediation of contaminated sites is a rapidly growing area of interest for engineers. Improper waste disposal practices and accidental spills have caused the contamination of soils, groundwater, and sediments at numerous sites. To protect public health and the environment, as well as allow for economic growth, remediation of these contaminated soils, groundwater, and sediments has become imperative. The goal, however, is to present various conventional and emerging remediation technologies for soils, groundwater, and sediments, and to provide training to use the necessary methods and tools to systematically evaluate and design remediation systems based on the site-specific conditions. Those who have an introductory understanding of chemistry and are practicing engineers dealing with contaminated sites, or educators who develop curriculum or teach a graduate-level course, will especially benefit from this presentation.

You will be given handouts and free software to assess or design remediation systems.

You Will Gain Knowledge About:

  • The fundamental aspects of physicochemical properties, groundwater flow, and contaminant   fate and transport.
  • The sources of contamination, regulations, and generalized remedial strategy.
  • How to develop site investigation programs and quantify risk.
  • How to appraise various containment and remediation technologies.
  • Lessons from field projects involving soil, groundwater, and sediment remediation.
  • Emerging green and sustainable remediation frameworks.
  • Awareness about emerging technologies and future directions.

 

INSTRUMENTATION, MONITORING, AND CONDITION ASSESSMENT OF FOUNDATIONS AND GEO-STRUCTURES

7:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. (full-day course)

Instructor:

Magued Iskander, Professor, Polytechnic Institute of New York University

The use of field instrumentation to monitor the on-site behavior of foundations, soils, embankments and structures is being increasingly required on numerous projects. It is important that geo-professionals develop an understanding about instrumentation and the monitoring of civil engineering projects including planning, design of instrumentation programs, the performance of commonly used sensors, data acquisition, signal conditioning, error analysis, information management, and case histories.

You Will Gain Knowledge About:

  • Instrumentation and monitoring of civil infrastructure.
  • Various sensors commonly used in civil engineering.
  • Data acquisition and information management.
  • Common measurement errors and error analysis.
  • Geospatial sensing methods such as GPS, robotic total stations, and Lidar used for remote monitoring of geo-structures.
  • Recent developments in sensing such as fiber optic strain gages.
  • How to plan and design instrumentation and monitoring programs.
  • How to use instrumentation to achieve better project performance.

 

GEOTECHNICAL ASPECTS OF PAVEMENT DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION

7:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. (full-day course)

Instructors:

Charles W. Schwartz, Professor, University of Maryland

Barry Christopher, Ph.D., P.E., Consultant

Erol Tutumluer, Professor, University of Illinois

The new AASHTO mechanistic-empirical pavement design procedure incorporates significant improvements in material characterization, climate effects, performance prediction, and other elements of pavement design. This course covers the latest methods and procedures for addressing the geotechnical issues in pavement design, construction, and performance for new construction, reconstruction, and rehabilitation pavement projects and contrasts the new mechanistic-empirical aspects with older empirical pavement design techniques. You also will learn about the design and construction of pavement subgrades and unbound materials; special geotechnical issues such as compaction, geosynthetics, and problem soils; drainage; and subgrade stabilization and working platform design.

You Will Gain Knowledge About:

  • The importance of the geotechnical aspects relevant to the design, construction, and long-term performance of flexible and rigid pavement systems.
  • An appreciation for appropriate exploration and characterization of subgrade soils.
  • How to determine the requisite design parameters for unbound base layers and drainage features for both empirical (AASHTO 93) and mechanistic-empirical (DARWin-ME) pavement design.

 

TESTING AND ANALYSIS OF PILES, AND DESIGN OF PILED FOUNDATIONS

7:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon (half-day course)

Instructor:

Bengt H. Fellenius, Dr.Tech., P.Eng., Consulting Engineer

The current trend in deep foundations is towards larger loads, larger diameter, and deeper piles, and the supported structures are becoming more sensitive to foundation deformation. As a result, static loading tests on instrumented piles are becoming more common. Additionally, the practice is increasingly requiring detailed analysis of the test and implementing the analysis results in foundation design. Advanced deep foundation design is a good deal more than finding some value of capacity. Indeed, capacity is not the primary issue, but load distribution and settlement under service load are. In this presentation, you will share in the broad generalities and in-depth details regarding several testing and analysis examples of piles and the design of piled foundations.

You Will Gain Knowledge About:

  • The pros and cons of the current methods of testing and the conventional head-down and the O-cell tests in reference to case histories.
  • Construction aspects.
  • Load and Resistance Factor Design (LRFD).
  • The basic principles of effective stress analysis which are correlated to case histories involving instrumented piles, residual load, and development over time.
  • The principles of settlement analysis of single piles and small and large pile groups from aspects of load directly on the piles and from influence from adjacent activity.
  • The design in settling ground and reclaimed land where piles will be affected by drag load and downdrag and the "Unified pile design method for capacity, settlement, drag load, and downdrag" using actual project examples.

 

MASW (MULTICHANNEL ANALYSIS OF SURFACE WAVES)

7:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon (half-day course)

Instructor:

Dr. Choon Park, Park Seismic LLC

MASW is a multichannel seismic method used to determine the shear-wave velocity (Vs) of ground (1-D and 2-D) down to depths of a few tens of meters. The method uses surface waves which contribute more than 70% of the total seismic wave energy and therefore represent the most troublesome noise during the conventional seismic surveys. Come see how to generate and record surface waves!

You Will Gain Knowledge About:

  • How to generate and record surface waves.
  • The multichannel seismic survey.
  • How to collect field data (active and Passive MASW).
  • How to process data (active and passive MASW).

 

RELIABILITY ANALYSIS AND DESIGN IN GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING

12:15 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. (half-day course)

Instructors:

Dr. Kok-Kwang Phoon, Professor, National University of Singapore

Dr. Jianye Ching, Professor, National Taiwan University

Reliability-based design (RBD) is increasingly mandated by new generation geotechnical codes of practice. The key objective of this short course is to cover the four “need to know” concepts below so you will learn how to compute a reliability index in a realistic and robust way:

  1. Familiarization with basic probability tools.
  2. Estimation of geotechnical uncertainties.
  3. Calculation of reliability index using Excel.
  4. Illustration using design examples.

You are encouraged to bring your laptop to follow the hands-on EXCEL demonstrations and, if time permits, to try additional worked examples under the guidance of the instructors. This course, conducted in various locales such as Taipei, Shanghai, and Munich, is based in part, on the textbook "Reliability-Based Design in Geotechnical Engineering: Computations and Applications" by KK Phoon (ed.), Taylor & Francis, 2008.

You Will Gain Knowledge About:

  • Basic probability tools.
  • Geotechnical uncertainty estimations.
  • How to calculate reliability index using Excel.
  • Illustration.

 

INTRODUCTION TO TUNNELING

12:15 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. (half-day course)

Instructor:

Dr. Fulvio Tonon, University of Texas at Austin

There is an increased environmental concern and sensitivity, together with population increase and urbanization, demand fast and sustainable transportation of people, water, and goods along with production and storage of energy. Tunnels and underground excavations oftentimes provide a life-cycle cost-effective alternative to surface or aerial infrastructure. The major benefit of this tunneling short course is to provide you a structured introduction to this field of application, with special emphasis on the geotechnical community.

You Will Gain Knowledge About:

  • Tunnel behavior.
  • The typical design and construction workflow.
  • How to describe and outline the investigation, diagnosis, and therapy phases of tunnel design.
  • The difference between confinement and pre-confinement.
  • The nomenclature on excavation systems.
  • How to identify the objectives and techniques for monitoring.