Introducing Unsaturated Flow Phenomena into an Undergraduate Civil Engineering Curriculum

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Engineering - Civil (54)The objective of this proposal is to introduce unsaturated flow phenomena in soils in undergraduate civil engineering education at the Colorado School of Mines by introducing unsaturated flow phenomena in soils. The project responds to a pressing need 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 foundation design methodology, which is based strictly on soils under saturated conditions, is now being supplemented with the considerations of unsaturated soil conditions in many structural foundation problems such as construction and operation of dams, natural slope stability and landslide analysis, underground waste containments, and expansive soil damages to houses and civil infrastructures. As a result, today's geotechnical engineers must deal with soils under unsaturated conditions in engineering practice; a subject typically excluded from many formal undergraduate education curricula. Furthermore, all soil mechanics and laboratory textbooks currently in use at the undergraduate level in the United States cover little, if any, material on unsaturated flow phenomena in soils. The fundamental concepts of unsaturated flow phenomena in soils are being incorporated into "Soil Mechanics" and "Soil Mechanics Laboratory" courses by adapting and implementing two experiments which illustrate unsaturated flow phenomena in soils. These experiments consist of "Soil Water- Suction Characteristic Curve Test" for quantifying dependency of soil suction head on water content, and "Coefficient of Permeability Test" for quantifying dependency of soil permeability on water content. Comprehension of the working principles for both experiments is critical for the full understanding of unsaturated flow in soils, and application of these principles to structural foundation design and other pressing geotechnical engineering problems.