Plenary lecture 5: design of foundation structures using the mechanics of unsaturated soils
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bearing capacity and settlement behavior are two key properties required in the design of foundations. In conventional geotechnical engineering practice, the bearing capacity of saturated soils are typically analyzed using two different approaches; effective and total stress approach using Terzaghi (1943) and Skempton (1948) bearing capacity theory, respectively. In most cases, the bearing capacity of unsaturated soils is also interpreted using the effective stress approach regardless of the type of soil (i.e., coarse- and fine-grained soils), which is not rational. In addition, the conventional theory for the estimation of immediate settlement using the modulus of elasticity, E of saturated soils cannot be extended for unsaturated soils or compacted soils as they do not attain saturated condition during their service period. The mechanics of saturated soils are however employed in practice due to the following two reasons: (i) extending the approach used for saturated soils to soils that are in a state of unsaturated condition provides conservative analysis and (ii) there is no simple framework to design geotechnical structures using the mechanics of unsaturated soils. In this paper, simple models are proposed for predicting both the bearing capacity and the modulus of elasticity of unsaturated soils for different types of soils. These models use the Soil-Water Characteristic Curve (i.e. SWCC), which is defined as the relationship between the water content and soil suction, as a tool along with saturated soil properties (i.e., bearing capacity and modulus of elasticity under saturated condition). Details of how the proposed models can be implemented into geotechnical engineering practice and differences associated with the proposed methods and conventional methods are also discussed with practical examples. Lastly, a method to estimate matric suction of as-compacted soils using a pocket penetrometer is described. The simple techniques proposed in this paper should encourage the geotechnical engineers to implement the mechanics of unsaturated soils in practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.101 | 0.047 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".