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Engineering and technology
- Soil mechanics
Recent advancements indicate that in the near and mid-term future, offshore regions will experience an increased population, with heightened demands for space utilization, energy resources, and construction plans. Offshore foundations impose dynamic loading on the soil and therefore the understanding of soil behavior soil under cyclic loads becomes increasingly important. Characterization of the stiffness of soil under increasing strain amplitudes has applications in both dynamic simulations of offshore foundations and earthquake-resistant geotechnical design of onshore and offshore structures. Moreover, measurement of soil physical properties is typically destructive, time-intensive, and costly. Over the last several decades there have been rapid advances in the use of non-destructive methods (e.g., Computed Tomography or CT) for the investigation of internal textures and physical properties of different materials. This project aims to investigate the static and dynamic behavior of soils first by using the traditional tests (cyclic triaxial and resonant column) and then compare these results with non-destructive techniques (CT) to develop consistent and interoperable methods for soil classification and estimation of mechanical properties.