Soil mechanics
Soil mechanics studies how soil’s physical and mechanical properties govern its response to forces, water, and loading in engineering works.
Effective stress: The stress carried by a soil’s grain skeleton after subtracting pore-water pressure from total stress. It links changes in groundwater pressure to changes in soil strength and deformation.
Soil texture: The relative proportions of sand, silt, and clay-sized particles in a soil. Grain-size proportions help predict drainage, plasticity, and engineering behavior.
Bearing capacity: The maximum pressure foundation ground can sustain before shear failure occurs. Foundation design checks whether applied loads exceed the supporting soil’s capacity.
Rock mechanics: The study of rock behavior under stress, including the influence of fractures and discontinuities. Rock masses often depend on joints and fractures, unlike soil’s grain-scale framework.
Shear strength: A material’s resistance to sliding along an internal surface under applied stress. It governs whether soil masses and foundations resist sliding or fail.
Atterberg limits: Water-content thresholds that describe transitions between consistency states in fine-grained soils. They help classify clays and estimate how their behavior changes with water content.
Slope stability: The assessment of whether a soil or rock slope can resist gravitational failure. Soil strength, groundwater, and loading determine the likelihood of slope movement.
Unsaturated soil mechanics: The study of soils whose pores contain both air and water. It extends conventional saturated-soil analysis to suction and partial saturation.
Consolidation: Time-dependent compression of saturated soil as pore water drains under sustained loading. It explains why settlement in fine-grained soils can continue long after construction.
Void ratio: The ratio of a soil’s void volume to its solid-particle volume. It quantifies the pore space that affects compressibility, strength, and fluid flow.