Monnet - In Situ Tests in Geotechnical Engineering

Series Editor
Gilles Pijaudier-Cabot

Jacques Monnet

First published 2015 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

ISTE Ltd
27-37 St Georges Road
London SW19 4EU
UK

www.iste.co.uk

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA

www.wiley.com

ISTE Ltd 2015
The rights of Jacques Monnet to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015952403

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84821-849-9

Jacques Monnet is a very incisive researcher, who does not accommodate with the classical approaches of in situ testing techniques or interpretation approaches, innovating with utmost originality in equipment, procedures and analysis. However, what could be seen as a pure speculative attitude, which frequently characterizes some of our researchers seeking for new publications, often complicating the objectiveness of ground characterizations, he has always proved to have a practical attitude giving solutions to problems that other more common test procedures do not solve. That was the case of some of the innovative pieces of equipment like the Gomcamtre described along with others in this book.

The result of his work expressed now in this book surpassed my expectations since I was not envisaging such an enriching document, plenty of objective solutions, together with the description of advanced techniques that he has been pursuing during his professional activity, allowing the enrolment of new solutions in non-textbook ground conditions and special projects.

As Jacques refers to, at beginning of the book, in situ tests for ground characterization have been suffering from a lack of credibility to some well known scientists, who prefer well controlled laboratory tests, pointed out as fundamental where the test conditions are well known and the measures are realiable and can allow the direct determination of the parameters that feed the increasing numerical codes available in geotech practice, with complex models behind them. This may be a consequence of the inertia of in situ testing specialists to diffuse the potentiality of in situ data, as well as being well interpreted and obtained from the most adapted techniques.

Jacques Monnet decided not to follow the usual pattern developed in many textbooks where the distinct technologies (equipment and procedures) are displayed sequentially. This practice is somehow an invertion of the natural process of geoengineering, conception/design of geotechnical problems, looking at the properties to be determined in each big group of grounds (soils or rocks or intermediate material), and then looking for the tools/methods that can help that process.

This book starts with the techniques and processes that allow the measurement of the essential physical indices and the sampling processes to obtain representative samples to deduce the best information in laboratory tests, where we forget that the soil has its own history before arriving at the laboratory. After detailing the processes of drilling, preparation, transportation of soils, through sampling, the chapter concludes with an approach to rock mechanics, finishing the natural step to the following, most important chapters related to the mechanical and hydraulic properties of soils. The approaches of each chapter are ruled by the properties that geotechnical practitioners are seeking, for which distinct solutions in terms of techniques (equipment, procedures and methods) are proposed, including common/classical tests, or advanced techniques. This comes as being quite logical as, for direct shear strengths, shear tests in boxes, vane tests, and the Philonnat phicomtre are suggested; for stress-strain relationships, and therefore for the evaluation of deformability and compressibility, the surface load tests (PLT), dilatometers (DMT), penetrometers (SPT, DP, CPT...), pressuremeters (PMT, SBPT) and dilatometer (DMT) tests as well as some new techniques, like Gomcamtre, are presented and their essential interpretation methods are developed. Then a very important chapter, currently forgotten in handbooks of site investigation, deals with permeabilty tests in soils, executed in localized points (from boreholes), but also the more generalized solutions for the evalaution of transmissivity, like the pumping tests with multi-checking points. The books ends with an interesting resum of the essential properies that can be derived and how they can be deduced from sustained correlations.

In summary, this book is a highly recommendable document for students and researchers, accademics and practitioners in engineering and will contribute to constructing one more pillar to allow for a better understanding of the geotechnical terroirs, enhanced by the advantage and the potentiality of using good in situ equipment, adapted for the purpose of our projects and interpreted with competence.

Antnio Viana da Fonseca
Chair of ISSMGE-TC1202
Ground Characterization from In Situ Testing
September 2015