Australian Geomechanics Society Newcastle, New South Wales – 1998 Meetings

• February, 1998

  EUROCODE 7 Part 3 : Field Testing - Methods & Interpretation

  Professor Karel Drozd, Charles University, Prague

  Professor Drozd is a long serving member on this Eurocode committee. Professor Karel Drozd presented the approach of Eurocode 7 to different methods of field testing and analysis of the results. Special reference was made to the limit states nature of this code. The presentation was illustrated by examples from his personal experiences through using this code.

• April, 1998

  Failures, Factors of Safety and Soil Strength

  Professor John Atkinson, Professor of Soil Mechanics, City University, London

  In routine geotechnical design of foundations, slopes and retaining walls a factor of safety is applied to ultimate collapse loads. But very different factors of safety are used for different structures. Also soil has several different strengths; peak, constant volume (or critical state) and residual. Moreover, it is not always clear what constitutes failure of geotechnical structures, or who decides when failure has occurred.

  The talk will consider the bases of conventional geotechnical design, the relationship between soil strength and stiffness, and choices of soil strength and factor of safety for routine design. This will lead to some simple methods for determining characteristic values for soil strength parameters for routine design of foundations and slopes.

• July, 1998

  Conference 1998 - Geotechnical Engineering & Engineering Geology in the Hunter Valley

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  Second joint AGS and Mine Subsidence Technology Society Conference to be held in Newcastle on July 12-14 1998. The conference included the presentation of 18 papers by invited authors as well as 10 other contributed papers.