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 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, utilization of mine wastes, geometric design of roads, groundwater recharge, storm water drainage modelling and treatment, water sensitive urban design, and environmental and seismic aspects of foundations and other structures.
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. 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.
Analytical expressions for the total active and passive thrusts 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. The research group has presented analytical expressions for different field situations.Other areas where research group has created innovative research outcomes are mine stopes, soil arching, rock slope stability, airport pavements, evaluation of elastic constants, burried conduits covered with geosynthetic-reinforced granular fills, mine utilization, etc.