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
1w ago
Although the need for many of the tables is a thing of the past, this is still a useful reference for mathematical functions such as integral tables, physical constants and Laplace transforms. It also includes the elliptic integrals which find use with the Boussinesq equations for circular loads on elastic media ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
1w ago
One of the things that gets covered (if not very thoroughly) in Soil Mechanics is how friction is developed in soils. An analogy is made with the classic “block on a surface” problem we see in Statics, but the tie-in isn’t as strong as one would like. The fact is that, for purely cohesionless soils ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
1M ago
A couple of years ago our bookstore was reorganised to put our offerings in wider distribution. Some of the discontinued titles are being put back into print, directly from the printer. Click on the title or image to to order. Bearing Capacity and Settlement This is actually two books in one. We also offer for ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
5M ago
Of all the topics I taught in my course on foundation design and analysis, my favourite topic was driven piles. I have taken this part of the course and am presenting it on the companion site vulcanhammer.info. The topics are as follows: In putting this together, I added some material, including a different example problem ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
5M ago
My post Getting to the Legacy of B.K. Hough and his Settlement Method got a good amount of interest. Unfortunately it left several “loose ends,” some of which is because we don’t have full information on some of Hough’s methodology, and others because we don’t have full information on the FHWA’s thinking in their resurrection of ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
6M ago
I’m starting a series on this subject as part of my support for Soils in Construction. It summarises over two decades of teaching the subject in addition to being the author of Pile Driving by Pile Buck. Hope you enjoy it ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
6M ago
One of those “things” in geotechnical engineering that looks like “settled science” but may not be is the whole business of lateral earth pressures for braced cuts. (An example of one is shown at the right.) Textbooks of all kinds (including Soils in Construction) show pressure profiles and solution techniques that are “definitive.” Or are ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
6M ago
Part of Soils in Construction‘s presentation of dewatering is this topic. I cover it in my treatment of flow nets in Soil Mechanics: Groundwater and Permeability II; however, Soils in Construction uses a less computationally intensive approach. In this piece I’ll explain that, give some better graphics than the book had available at the time of ..read more
Vulcan Hammer
6M ago
Readers of my post Analytical Boussinesq Solutions for Strip, Square and Rectangular Loads and those related to it know that the math related to these methods can get complicated, and in any case the idea of a “purely elastic” soil response to load is purely theoretical. So is there a simpler way? The most common simplification ..read more