Advances on Testing and Experimentation in Civil Engineering

Book excerpt: The book presents the recent advances on testing and experimentation in civil engineering, especially in the branches of geotechnics, transportation, hydraulics, and natural resources. It includes advances in physical modelling, monitoring techniques, data acquisition and analysis, and provides an invaluable contribution for the installation of new civil engineering experimental facilities. The first part of the book covers the latest advances in testing and experimentation in key domains of geotechnics: soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering, rock mechanics and rock engineering, and engineering geology. Some of the topics covered include new developments in topographic survey acquisition for applied mapping and in situ geotechnical investigations; laboratory and in situ tests to estimate the relevant parameters needed to model the behaviour of rock masses and land structures; monitoring and inspection techniques designed for offshore wind foundations. The second part of the book highlights the relevance of testing and monitoring in transportation. Full-scale accelerated pavement testing, and instrumentation becomes even more important nowadays when, for sustainability purposes, non-traditional materials are used in road and airfield pavements. Innovation in testing and monitoring pavements and railway tracks is also developed in this part of the book. Intelligent traffic systems are the new traffic management paradigm, and an overview of new solutions is addressed here. Finally, in the third part of the book, trends in the field and laboratory measurements and corresponding data analysis are presented according to the different hydraulic domains addressed in this publication, namely maritime hydraulics, surface water and river hydraulics and urban water.