What is Geotechnical Engineering? History Of Geotechnical . Importance Of Geotechnical Engineering or Soil Mechanics.

What is Geotechnical Engineering? History Of Geotechnical . Importance Of Geotechnical Engineering or Soil Mechanics. 

The discipline of civil engineering dealing with the engineering behaviour of ground materials is known as geotechnical engineering. For the solution of its respective engineering challenges, it employs soil and rock mechanics principles. Knowledge of geology, hydrology, geophysics, and other relevant subjects is also required. Geological engineering has a subdiscipline called geotechnical (rock) engineering.

Geotechnical engineering includes applications in military, mining, petroleum, coastal engineering, and offshore building, in addition to civil engineering. While geotechnical engineering and engineering geology both have knowledge areas that overlap, geotechnical engineering is a civil engineering specialisation, whereas engineering geology is a geology specialist: They are both based on the same concepts of soil and rock mechanics, but their applications are different.

History Of Geotechnical Engineering. 

Soil has been used by humans for flood control, irrigation, burial places, building foundations, and building construction for thousands of years. The earliest activities were linked to irrigation and flood control, as evidenced by traces of dykes, dams, and canals found in ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, and the Fertile Crescent, as well as around the early settlements of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa in the Indus valley, dating back to at least 2000 BCE. Structures were established on organised foundations as cities grew larger; the Ancient Greeks, for example, built pad footings and strip-and-raft foundations. However, no theoretical foundation for soil design had been formed until the 18th century, and the field was more of an art than a science, relying on prior experience.

Several foundation-related engineering issues, such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, spurred scientists to begin researching the subsurface in a more scientific manner. The development of earth pressure theories for the construction of retaining walls was one of the first breakthroughs. In 1717, Henri Gautier, a French Royal Engineer, discovered the "natural slope" of various soils, which was later referred to as the soil's angle of repose. A basic soil categorization system was also devised, based on the unit weight of a substance, which is no longer regarded as a reliable indicator of soil type.

When Charles Coulomb (a physicist, engineer, and army captain) created new methods to calculate the earth pressures on military barriers in 1773, he was the first to apply mechanics principles to soils. Coulomb noticed that when a sliding retaining wall fails, a distinct slip plane forms behind it, and he proposed that the maximum shear stress on the slip plane, for design reasons, be equal to the total of the soil cohesion. Coulomb's theory was combined with Christian Otto Mohr's 2D stress state to form the Mohr-Coulomb theory. The Mohr-Coulomb theory is still used in practise today, despite the fact that precise determination of cohesion is impossible because displaystyle cc is not a fundamental soil property.

Darcy's Law, which describes the flow of fluids in porous media, was developed by Henry Darcy in the nineteenth century. William Rankine, an engineer and physicist, developed an alternative to Coulomb's earth pressure theory. Joseph Boussinesq (a mathematician and physicist) developed theories of stress distribution in elastic solids that proved useful for estimating stresses at depth in the ground. Albert Atterberg created the clay consistency indices, which are still used to classify soils today. [1][2] Shearing generates volumetric dilation of dense materials and contraction of loose granular materials, as Osborne Reynolds discovered in 1885.

The publication of Karl Terzaghi's Erdbaumechanik in 1925 is credited as the start of modern geotechnical engineering (a mechanical engineer and geologist). Terzaghi, widely regarded as the founder of contemporary soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering, discovered the idea of effective stress and demonstrated that effective stress controls soil shear strength. [4] Terzaghi also created the framework for theories of foundation bearing capacity and a theory for predicting the pace of consolidation-induced settlement of clay layers. [1] [3] [5] Following that, Maurice Biot fully developed the three-dimensional soil consolidation theory, extending Terzaghi's one-dimensional model to more broad hypotheses and introducing the Poroelasticity set of basic equations.