Role of Geo-technical Engineers
Everything you see around you is supported by soil or rock. Civil Engineers, especially the Geo-technical Engineers are responsible for that. Anything that is not supported by soil or rock, either floats, flies or falls down. Lets see the importance and the role of Geo-technical Engineers by real-time examples. Geo-technical Engineering, as the name implies, is whatever that has to do with the earth, the soil and the ground. For a clear understanding, the Chenani-Nashri tunnel in Jammu and Kashmir, there are a large tunnel network being built. These tunnels have to go through a mountain, go through rock, go through soil. We have to understand the soil, we have to understand the rock, we have to see how to make this tunnel safe when you are drilling, boring and also during its life it has to be safe enough and it should withstand the pressure of the earth around it and the movements and so on.
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| Chenani-Nashri tunnel |
Whenever we have a large building, a high-rise building, you need a strong foundation, because everything that you see above the ground is transferring the load into the ground. You have to make sure that the structure is going to be stable. We have to understand how to make a foundation of these structures so that they will last a long time and keep the building safe. Also, we have to understand that the earth itself can move, the ground can move when there is an earthquake or when there is settlement. So, we want to make sure that it stays stable. There are techniques where you can strengthen the ground. There are ground strengthening techniques, if the ground is not strong enough for what you are going to put on top of it. We may not have a choice to say that we cannot build here, we can move elsewhere. We have to see how to make the ground strong enough for whatever we are constructing on top or within it. Geo-technical Engineers understand earth materials, whatever is in the ground, and see how to design safe foundations for structures that we are going to place on them or within them. They analyse the behavior of soil and rock so that they can design these structures safely, the structures could be high rise buildings, could be pavements, underground facilities, we talked about tunnels. In India, almost all the major cities are having metro tunnels and surely, we will have these projects running for several decades in India and other parts of the world. These structures are mostly or at least partially under the ground and we have to make sure that the drilling process and the excavation is done safely and economically and the structure once it is constructed is safe enough for transportation to occur through it.
Underground structures are becoming more and more important. We also need underground structures for containment of waste. Suppose, we have radioactive waste and we have to store it safely, we cannot have leakages and we cannot afford to have this waste escape into the environment. So, we need containment vessels, we need containment structures that will keep contaminated waste or waste that could contaminate in a protected place. Foundations are the substructure which holds the superstructure that we see above the ground. Anything that is on the ground, under the ground needs Geo-technical Engineers to study the situation and tell how to go about it. And for this, the Geo-technical Engineer have to understand mathematics well because there is a lot of modeling of the response required. Physics, of course, they have to understand soil mechanics, how the soil will deform, move and shift.
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| Retaining Wall |
There are a lot of theories which tell us how the soil will behave, how rock will behave and how will they fail. We also need to know how failure will occur so that we can prevent it and can design for loads that will not cause failure. Foundation design is very much required for any type of structure because the ground has to withstand the loads, should not deform too much and it should be safe enough for the structure to sit on it. Slope stability is very important because we have areas where you have to cut through mountains, hilly areas and when we make a cut, we leave a slope that could become unstable and collapse, and we certainly do not want that to happen. So, we will have to understand how to cut a slope so that it does not collapse, and if it has a potential for collapse what should we do to maintain the stability of a slope.
Seismic Engineering is everything to do with earthquakes. Earthquakes, as we all know, involves the shaking of the earth. It can be vertical, horizontal and combination of both. If we have a structure sitting on the earth and the earth is moving, the structure could fail, the soil could become loose, liquefy, settle crack and so on. We have to anticipate what could happen in a certain region. With more and more knowledge in seismic engineering, we are designing our structures better for such type of actions that come from earthquakes. About underground structures, the best example that is closest to most of us is metros. We use subways and we want them to be safe, because we cannot make transportation within a city without metros nowadays. So, everywhere we have metro construction happening and we want to understand, the best way to construct and keep these structures safe.
Geo-technical Engineers studies and works for the safe and stability of the structure. The role of Geo-technical Engineers starts from designing, then construction and also for post construction works.
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