Introducing Chemical Transport Phenomena in Soils into the Undergraduate Civil Engineering Curriculum

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Engineering - Civil (54) The objective of this project is to establish a curriculum change in undergraduate civil engineering education at the Colorado School of Mines. The changes reflect a major shift in civil engineering practice by filling the gap between current textbooks and engineering practice. Over the last two decades, geotechnical engineering, a sub-discipline of civil engineering, has experienced radical changes. Traditional focus on the stability of structural foundations is now supplemented with environmental considerations such as soil contamination and subsurface waste isolation. As a result, today's geotechnical engineers must deal with soil chemistry in engineering practice, a subject typically excluded from formal undergraduate education. Furthermore, all of the soil mechanics textbooks currently in use at the undergraduate level in the United States cover little if any material on chemical transport phenomena in soils. It is, therefore, imperative to establish this major change in undergraduate curriculum.In this project, fundamental concepts of chemical transport phenomena in soils are being introduced into the companion courses "Soil Mechanics" and "Soil Mechanics Laboratory" by adapting and implementing two experiments illustrating chemical transport phenomena in soils: Chemical Diffusion Test for demonstrating chemical diffusion phenomena (after Shackelford at Colorado State University), and Chemical Osmosis Test for demonstrating chemical potential as a viable driving force for fluid flow (after an apparatus used at the US Geological Survey, Louisiana State University, and others). The physical phenomena of chemical diffusion underlying the first experiment is one of the dominating transport mechanisms in soils. The chemical potential governing fluid flow depicted by the second experiment becomes very significant when fine-grained soils such as clays are encountered. Comprehension of both mechanisms is critical for the full understanding of today's environmental design issues such as contaminated soil remediation and underground waste containment. Currently, both Soil Mechanics and Soil Mechanics Laboratory are compulsory courses in all civil engineering curricula in the United States. Because at Colorado School of Mines over one hundred students (reflecting 20% of seniors at CSM) are required to take both courses annually, the course curriculum change and laboratory implementation will have broad impacts campus wide as well as lasting impacts on students' careers. This project provides a testing ground for the feasibility and necessity of the proposed curriculum reform nationwide.