Introduction to Transparent Soils

Abstract

Experimental models to measure spatial deformation patterns within a soil mass are typically limited by the fact that soil sensors do not provide a continuous image of the measured continuum. Additionally, soil sensors exhibit static and dynamic characteristics that are different from those of the surrounding soils, and therefore can change the response of the measured continuum. The fundamental premise of this research is that transparent synthetic soil surrogates can be used to represent the behavior of natural soils in model tests in order to overcome these difficulties. This book presents experimental methods that are fundamentally different from previous experiment studies, where spatial flow patterns and deformations are obtained non-intrusively and continuously without interruption from sensors. In the short term, transparent synthetic soils and the proposed optical set-up and image processing technique are expected to be easily adjusted and applied in geotechnical engineering research. In the long term, transparent synthetic soils should prove to be a powerful tool in solving many geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering problems and become helpful in the design of many new structures.