Paul Joseph ... 160 pages - Publisher: Taylor&Francis; (April, 2017) ... Language:
English - ISBN-10:
1138723223 - ISBN-13:
9781138723221 ...
This book is a short yet rigorous course on a new paradigm in soil
mechanics, one that holds that soil deformation occurs as a simple
friction-based Poisson process in which soil particles move to their
final position at random shear strains. It originates from work by
Casagrande's soil mechanics group at Harvard University that found that
an aggregate of soil particles when sheared reaches a "steady-state"
condition, a finding in line with the thermodynamics of dissipative
systems. The book unpacks this new paradigm as it applies to soils. The
theory explains fundamental, ubiquitous soil behaviors and relationships
used in soils engineering daily thousands of times across the world,
but whose material bases so far have been unknown. These include for
example, why for one-dimensional consolidation, the e-log sigma line is
linear, and why Calpha/Cc is a constant for a given soil. The subtext of
the book is that with this paradigm, the scientific method of trying to
falsify hypotheses fully drives advances in the field, i.e., that soil
mechanics now strictly qualifies as a science that, in turn, informs
geotechnical engineering.The audience for the book is senior
undergraduates, graduate students, academics, and researchers as well as
industry professionals, particularly geotechnical engineers. It will
also be useful to structural engineers, highway engineers, military
engineers, persons in the construction industry, as well as planetary
scientists. Because its fundamental findings hold for any mass of
particles like soils, the theory applies not just to soils, but also to
powders, grains etc. so long as these are under pseudo-static (no
inertial effects) conditions.