- Civil and Environmental Engineering
- University of Massachusetts
- Amherst, Ma. 01003
GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING
FACILITIES
- General Information: Telephone 413-545-2580 ; Fax 413- 545-2840
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Comments on missing links of the webpage: Ching S. Chang
Facilities
The geotechnical engineering facilities include four laboratories and a field test site. One laboratory houses a moist storage room for soil samples and concrete specimen curing.
In addition to standard soil testing equipment the laboratories have a variety of more specialized devices including a temperature controlled Ko consolidation device, rigid and flexible wall permeameters, constant head permeameters, tempe cell system for unsaturated soil suction and permeability measurements, instrumented triaxial apparatus with data acquisition systems, a computer-controlled multidirectional direct simple shear apparatus, Geonor direct simple shear apparatus, large cyclic triaxial cell for coarse-grained soils, Los Angeles Abrasion test and other equipment for characterizing aggregate properties, large pressure vessel for pipe testing and calibrating earth pressure cells.
Two servo-hydraulic controlled cyclic test facilities have been established for simulating repeated loads from highway and rail traffic. One is used to determine the resilient moduli of granular base and subbase materials and fine grained subgrade materials used in highway construction. The AASHTO T294-92I protocol is controlled by a PC using a LabVIEW program. The other is a larger device used for evaluating properties of railway ballast under repeated wheel loading.
An extensive array of in situ soil testing equipment is available including a dilatometer, a vane shear device, a borehole shear tester, an electric cone, a piezocone, and a pressuremeter. Field geotechnical instrumentation is also available including earth pressure cells, inclinometers, soil strain gages and piezometers, along with the appropriate data acquisition equipment.
Engineering Computer Services (ECS) provides the College of Engineering with Network, Mail and Computing resources for all faculty and students. The facility supports more than 250 workstations and 300 networked personal computers distributed in the six engineering buildings. ECS also makes available several public computer labs for use by all students in the College of Engineering. Personal computer systems are available in the offices and labs for the development and use of computer programs for geotechnical engineering research and instruction. Peripheral equipment includes laser printers, multi-colored pen plotters and scanners. New capabilities are being added each year. The geotechnical computing facilities include a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Laboratory. The GIS Laboratory is equipped to run UNIX-based Arc/Info (ESRI, Inc.) on a Sun Ultra 1 workstation with an E-size CalComp digitizer and HP DesignJet color plotter. The system is capable of advanced spatial analysis and detailed map generation.
The Civil Engineering capabilities are supplemented by excellent facilities for material identification in the Mechanical Engineering, Geology, Polymer Science, and Soil Science Departments including x-ray diffractometer, scanning mercury porosimeter, scanning electron microscopes, and differential thermal analyzer. The Geotechnical Engineering Group also maintains strong ties with the Environmental Engineering Group which has excellent laboratories for water quality testing and soil gas analyses.
Shop facilities are available in the College of Engineering to fabricate a variety of experimental apparatus for research and instruction. These facilities include a machine shop, a woodworking shop, a metal and welding shop, a glass blowing shop, and electronics design and fabrication equipment. The Department of Civil Engineering employs two full time technicians who have extensive expertise in electronic/electrical and mechanical systems. These support personnel are available on a regular basis to help in the design and fabrication of test equipment.
The Physical Sciences Library is the University's principal repository for books, periodicals and other reference material pertaining to engineering and the physical sciences. The library's collection includes materials chemistry, computer science, mathematics and statistics, physics, polymer science, wood technology, and all areas of engineering. The library's holdings include approximately 151,000 books and bound periodicals. There are also approximately 1,400 current subscription to journals in the subject fields served by the library. A large collection of technical reports of government-sponsored research is also maintained. The University is also a member of the Boston Library Consortium allowing students access to extensive research collections outside the institute (e.g., MIT, BU, BC, NE, and Tufts).
