SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 7 - 9 may 2008
New Fellows Seminar
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Professor Scott Sloan
ARC Federation Fellow and Professor of Civil Engineering, Centre for Geotechnical and Materials Modelling, Civil, Surveying and Environmental Engineering, University of Newcastle
Scott Sloan works in the field of computational geomechanics. He has a degree in engineering and a masters degree in engineering science from Monash University, and a Master of Philosophy and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has authored over 200 refereed publications, received 22 ARC research grants, and is the recipient of several international research awards including the 2000 Telford Medal from the Institution of Civil Engineers London, the 2005 Thomas A Middlebrooks Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the 2007 Telford Premium by the Institution of Civil Engineers London. He serves on the editorial boards of six international journals dealing with geotechnical engineering and computational mechanics and is a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.
New methods for geotechnical stability analysis
To build geostructures such as tunnels, cuttings, foundations and dams, geotechnical engineers must first perform a stability analysis to determine the maximum (or limit) load that the ground can support without causing collapse. For many geotechnical problems, which typically involve complicated ground conditions and three-dimensional geometries, the limit load is very difficult to predict. Geotechnical stability analysis is usually performed by a variety of approximate methods that are based on the notion of limit equilibrium. These techniques have a number of major disadvantages, including the need to presuppose an appropriate failure mechanism in advance, which can lead to grossly inaccurate predictions of the true failure load. Over the last decade, colleagues and I have developed powerful new methods of analysis that have been used to obtain new stability solutions for a wide range of practical problems including soil anchors, slopes, foundations, excavations, tunnels, and mine workings. This presentation will give a brief outline of the new techniques and consider a number of practical applications.
