Geotechnical Engineering Principles and Practices

Geotechnical Engineering: Principies and Practices is primarily intended for use as a textbook for undergraduate civil engineering students enrolled in an introductory course. It also serves well as a reference book for students in follow-on courses and for practicing engineers. As the title infers, this book covers both "principies" (the fundamentals of soil mechanics) and "practices" (the application of these principies to practica! engineering problems). This integrated approach gives the reader a broader understanding of geotechnical engineering and provides a foundation for future studies. This book is the product of thirteen years experience teaching undergraduate geotechnical engineering courses. It is an expanded version of course notes I originally developed for m y students, and thus reflects teaching methods that have worked well at Cal Poly. In addition, the manuscript for this book was extensively tested in the classroom befare going to press. This classroom testing allowed me to evaluate and refine the text itself, the example problems, the homework problems, and the software. Key features of this book include: • An entire chapter on engineering geology (Chapter 2). This chapter is especially helpful for readers who have not taken a geology course and is a good review for those who have. • Another chapter on geoenvironmental engineering (Chapter 9) that includes discussions of contaminant transport and remediation, and sanitary landfills. • Clear and concise explanations of the theories and assumptions behind geotechnical analyses. • Frequent discussions of the sources and magnitudes of uncertainties in geotechnical analyses. • Use ofboth English and SI units, because engineers in North America and many other parts of the world need to be conversant in both systems. • Easy-to-use Windows software developed specifically for this book. This software may be downloaded from the Prentice Hall web site. It has been carefully integrated into the text, and is designed as a tool to enhance learning. In each case, the student must first sol ve homework problems by hand to master the analysis. Then he or she is introduced to the software, which allows exploration of more difficult problems that would otherwise be too tedious to solve by hand. • Extensive use of example problems to illustrate the various analyses. • Carefully developed homework problems distributed throughout the chapters, with comprehensive problems at the end of each chapter. • Discussions of recent developments in geotechnical engineering, including geosynthetics, soil improvement, and geotechnical earthquake engineering.