Vulcan Hammer
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Vulcan Hammer is a comprehensive resource for geotechnical and marine engineers, contractors, owners, and equipment specialists. The blog page is loaded with geotechnical engineering resources and educational materials.
Vulcan Hammer
1M ago
On this site we feature the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers publication Retaining and Flood Walls, which details the design of several types of retaining walls. As it was published a good while back, it details the design of these walls using hand calculations. Sometimes these can get tedious, especially when the aptly named “trial ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
2M ago
One thing any academic does (except those at grand institutions where they get to have someone else do it for them) is evaluate students through grading. Most institutions afford students the opportunity to retaliate through the faculty evaluation system in place. That usually takes places at the end of the term, although my institution now ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
4M ago
It’s citation time again; this paper, authored by Heeyong Huh, Heedong Goh, Jun Won Kang, Stijn François and Loukas F. Kallivokas, cites both Closed Form Solution of the Wave Equation for Piles and Improved Methods for Forward and Inverse Solution of the Wave Equation for Piles. It is available here. The abstract is as follows: The impulse–response ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
4M ago
Once again I find myself cited, this time in this paper by Yuan TU , M.H. El Naggar , Kuihua Wang , Wenbing WU , and Juntao WU. The citation comes from my paper “A New Type of Wave Equation Program,” documenting the development of the ZWAVE computer program. The abstract of this paper is ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
4M ago
As always I was gratified to be cited in the recent paper “3D FE analysis of bored pile- pile cap interaction in sandy soils under axial compression- parametric study,” by Faisal I. Shalabi, Mohammad U. Saleem, Hisham J. Qureshi, Md Arifuzzaman, Kaffayatullah Khan, and Muhammad M. Rahman. It is an interesting study of the topic ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
6M ago
I’ve dealt with the issue of consolidation extensively since my first post on the subject, From Elasticity to Consolidation Settlement: Resolving the Issue of Jean-Louis Briaud’s “Pet Peeve”. His problem was the lack of relationship between the way we handle consolidation settlement vs. elastic settlement. In this post I plan to look at a different problem ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
6M ago
It’s been a favourite topic of this site to consider the issue of alpha vs. beta methods for deep foundations (both driven and bored piles.) In our post Shaft Friction for Driven Piles in Clay: Alpha or Beta Methods? we show that the Kolk and van der Velde method for driven piles in clay can be ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
8M ago
One type of foundation that needs some explanation are floating or compensated foundations. Since they are sometimes referred to as “floating,” some fluid mechanics background is in order. Fluid Mechanics For ships to float, they obey Archimedes’ Law, where the weight of the ship is equal to the weight of water displaced by the hull ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
8M ago
In our posts Analytical Boussinesq Solutions for Strip, Square and Rectangular Loads and Going Around in Circles for Rigid and Flexible Foundations we discussed foundations on an elastic, homogeneous half-space, mostly purely flexible. In the latter post we ventured into rigid foundations but stuck with the semi-infinite spaces. In this post we’re going to explore cases where ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
8M ago
In our earlier post Analytical Boussinesq Solutions for Strip, Square and Rectangular Loads we discussed the stress under and settlement of foundations (mostly flexible) on a semi-infinite half space. Usually, though, somewhere in there a hard/competent layer intervenes to mess things up. Some of the books offered on this site–in print and download–have solutions for this ..read more