Geotechnical Engineering Of Hard Soils Soft Rocks Geological Features Investigation And Classification Mechanical Properties And Behaviour

Geotechnical Engineering of Hard Soils, Soft Rocks: Geological features, investigation and classification. Mechanical properties and behaviour

Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering

This publication contains the papers presented at the 15th European Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ECSMGE), held in Athens, Greece. Considerable progress has been made in recent decades in understanding the engineering behavior of those hard soils and weak rocks that clearly fall into either the field of soil or of rock mechanics, and there have been important developments in design and construction methods to cope with them. Progress would be even more desirable, however, for those materials which fall into the ‘grey’ area between soils and rocks. They present particular challenges due to their diversity, the difficulties and problems arising in their identification and classification, their sampling and testing and in the establishment of suitable models to adequately describe their behavior. The publication aims to provide an updated overview of the existing worldwide knowledge of the geological features, engineering properties and behavior of such hard soils and weak rocks, with particular reference to the design and construction methods and problems associated with these materials. Part 4 was published post-conference and includes Conference Reports.

Statistical Rock Physics

The book is the first systematic and comprehensive treatise of stochastic models and computational tools that have emerged in rock-physics in the last 20 years. The field of statistical rock-physics is a part of rock-physics (Petrophysics). Its concepts, methods and techniques are borrowed from stochastic geometry and statistical physics. This discipline describes the interior geometry of rocks; derives their effective physical properties based on their random composition and the random arrangement of their constituents; and builds models to simulate the past geological processes that had formed the rock. The aim of the book is to help the readers to understand the claims, techniques and published results of this new field and—most importantly—to teach them in order to creatively apply stochastic geometry and statistical physics in their own research tasks. For this purpose, the underlying mathematics will be discussed in all sections of the book; numerical solutions will be highlighted; a full set of references will be provided; and theory will go hand-in-hand with practical applications to hydraulic permeability, electric conduction, rock failure, NMR, mechanics of random grain packings, as well as the compaction of shale.