"What is failure and why do failures occur?"

By: John Atkinson, Senior Principal, Coffey Geotechnics.
Emeritus Professor of Soil Mechanics, City University, London.

Abstract

Ground engineering is a risky business; there is much that can, and does, go wrong. Failures in the ground can be more than just slips, excessive settlement or flooding. Sometimes failure of the ground is a requirement of the design.

The talk will consider the nature of geotechnical failures in a wide sense. Examples will be used to illustrate some of the main causes of problems in the ground including unforeseen ground conditions (or inadequate ground investigations), mis-understanding of basic soil mechanics, inappropriate analyses and workmanship.

The principal conclusion is most geotechnical failures arise from gross error which raises issues of education and, particularly, training of geotechnical professionals.

Bio

John Atkinson is Senior Principal at Coffey Geotechnics and Emeritus Professor of Soil Mechanics at City University, London.

He graduated in Civil Engineering from Imperial College in 1964. He then emigrated to Australia and worked with contractors and consultants in Queensland including a spell with Coffey and Hollingsworth in their Brisbane office.

He returned to Imperial College and was awarded an MSc in 1970 and a PhD in 1973 for research on soil stiffness. He was a research assistant at Cambridge University where he directed research on soft ground tunnelling and senior lecturer in Civil and Structural Engineering at University College, Cardiff. In 1980 he was appointed Reader in Soil Mechanics at City University, London and he was promoted to the Chair of Soil Mechanics in 1985. He founded the City University Geotechnical Engineering Research Centre and helped to establish the London Geotechnical Centrifuge Centre.

John Atkinson is expert in investigation of soil behaviour and in centrifuge model testing. He has worked on the behaviour of many different soils including soft and stiff clays, carbonate and quartz sands, saprolites and tills. He has used centrifuge modelling to investigate a number of different problems including ground movements around tunnels in soft ground and drainage and stability of granular cargoes in bulk carrier ships. He has advised industry and acted as expert on diverse problems including tunnelling and shaft sinking, loadings on large buried pipes, movement of granular cargo in bulk carrier ships and determination of soil and rock parameters for design.

He has lectured widely in UK and overseas; he was the Rankine Lecturer in 2000; he is author of several text-books on soil mechanics and foundation engineering. He ha been Editor of Geotechnique and Chair of the Engineering Group of the Geological Society.

From 1995 to 1997 he was a Royal Society Industry Fellow with Arup Geotechnics and he was a Consultant with them until 2006. He is currently Senior Principal with Coffey Geotechnics.