Theoretical and Numerical Unsaturated Soil Mechanics



Foreword

The event is a continuation of the series of International Conferences on Unsaturated

Soils in Germany. The first International Conference was held during

September 2003 in Bauhaus-University Weimar, Weimar, Germany. The

current event is the second one in the series entitled “Mechanics of Unsaturated

Soils.” The primary objective of the Conference has been to discuss

and understand unsaturated soil behaviour such that engineered activities are

made better with times in terms of judgement and quality. We all realise by

now that in addition to the knowledge on the classical concepts, it becomes

an enormous challenging task to adapt convincing new concepts and present

them in such a way that it could be used in engineering practices. During

the last six years or so (2001–2007), scientific research works were extensively

taken up by five scientific research teams from five German universities,

whose scientific leaders are Wolfgang Ehlers (Universität Stuttgart), Jens Engel

(HTW Dresden), Rainer Helmig and Holger Claas (Universität Stuttgart),

Tom Schanz (Bauhaus Universität Weimar), Christos Vrettos, Helmut Meissner

and Andreas Becker (Universität Kaiserslautern). The research studies

involved theoretical and numerical approaches along with experimental studies

on unsaturated soils. These two volumes present recent research findings

obtained within this collaboration by the above research groups along with

excellent contributions from several research groups throughout the World.

The experimental studies reported herein primarily focussed on the role

of microstructure and fabric for the complex coupled hydro-mechanical behaviour

of cohesive frictional materials. Several papers considered the relevance

of temperature affecting the constitutive behaviour of clays. A careful

reader may recognise that in both the topics there is an ambiguity with regard

to the conclusions derived. Common features of state of the art theoretical

and numerical approaches, including TPM (theory of porous media) and

mixture theory, intend to describe the complex multi-field problems of fully

coupled thermo-hydraulic-mechanical-chemical initial-boundary value problems.

Additional important field of research includes optimization of numerical

schemes to gain better computational performance. Applications include


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