Geotechnical Engineering N is the continuous from the Rock and Soil Mechanics which provides further knowledge, including embedded retaining walls, analysis of the slope stability of an earth dams, design of slabs on expansive soils and pavement designs for the given traffic conditions. Nowadays, Geotechnical Engineering plays an important role in the engineering field which concerned the behaviour of earth materials. Start of the couple of weeks for the semester were quite interesting because the 1st assignment was dealing with the GALENA software which used to design the dam stability and this assignment was much challenging than the previous assignments on Rock and Soils and it also provides deeper knowledge on designing. From the dam stability assignment, it was quite interesting which I learnt 3 cases in the design in order to anticipate conditions over the life of the dam. This assignment provides good fundamental knowledge of designing dam stability which can be used in my workplace in the future. Reactivity practical was good which we needed to work out the soil suction value, shrinkage swell and etc. For the following weeks the semester was getting more and more challenging where we introduced some new programs such as Cord and Slog for Slab design and CIRCLY for Pavement design which are very useful in the geotechnical engineering field.
End of Semester
Apart from that, Expansive soil Technology, Design of Slabs for Expansive Soils, Road Pavements, Elements of Pavement Design, Pavement material specification and design and finally management of pavement lectures were quite interesting. Cord and Slog programs are very useful in designing the slab of a structural which help us to design the minimum of steel requirement for slab and beam depth. The latter part of the course was focuses on pavement engineering which use program CIRCLY to make economic pavement designs for the given traffic conditions. We also have Mr. Hugo van Loon as our guest lecturer on few topics of the pavement designs. Mr. Hugo also expert in pavement industry and he has been working for DTEI several years. The lectures from him were good. From the CIRCLY practical, I found that it was interesting because we need to design the thickness of the pavement layer in order to achieve the required DESA ratio. Pavements are designed and tested whether it can withstand the stress from the different kind of traffic. In week 13, we went for a field trip to DTEI at Walkleys Height on Melbourne Cup Day. From the trip, we were shown how does the asphalt are mixed and tests done in the lab. Dr Don has done a good job for the entire semester and I was very impressive and satisfy with the knowledge I learnt from this course.