Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering Research Group

At the Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering Research Group, we work on providing practical solutions to the problems in the broad area of civil engineering practice known as the Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering.

Our focus

Our current research focuses on several specific topics such as geosynthetic applications in civil and mining engineering projects, fibre-reinforced soils, slope stability under seismic loading conditions, soil arching, stress distribution within mine stopes, static and dynamic earth pressures, highway and runway pavement deflection, pile foundation analysis, elastic constants for compressible and incompressible materials, vibration analysis and monitoring, groundwater recharge, storm water drainage modelling and treatment, and water sensitive urban design.

Our research

We have recently developed many new engineering concepts for applications in field projects.

Reinforced soil is a composite construction material formed by combining soil and reinforcement. It can be obtained by either incorporating continuous reinforcement inclusions (for example, strip, bar, sheet, mat or net) within a soil mass in a definite pattern or mixing discrete fibres randomly with a soil fill before placement. The research group has been studying the fundamental and practical aspects of reinforced soils. Some of the findings are being appreciated and used by the engineers.

Predicting the strength behaviour of the fibre-reinforced soils has been a challenging task for civil engineers since its development. This problem has been recently solved by developing a simple mathematical model. The model shows that an increase in strength follows the variation as reported by several researchers based on their experimental works.

Analytical expressions for the total active thrust from the backfills have been quite popular among engineers for designing retaining structures since their development. In most real-life projects, the backfills are c-f soils. Estimating the dynamic active thrust on the retaining structures from such soil backfills has not been possible by analytical methods considering both horizontal and vertical seismic loadings. Similar expressions have also been presented for total passive resistance from c-f soils. With the development of analytical expressions by the research group, the task has become easy for practising engineers.

Academic members

Adjunct academic members

Research staff and students

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

  • Dr. Vishwas A. Sawant
    Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India

PhD

  • MD Monir Hossain
  • Ching Ting (Enrolled at JCU)
  • Lalit Borana (Enrolled at HK PolyU)

Masters

  • Alex Z Y Cai