Geotechnical Characteristics of Soils and Rocks around the World

Every country needs to construct and maintain the infrastructures, such as buildings, bridges, towers, roads, railway tracks, runways, ports and harbours, tunnels, dams, embankments, retaining structures, and landfills, in both urban and rural areas in a cost-effective, environmentally friendly and sustainable manner. Similar infrastructures are also required in agriculture, aquaculture and industrial areas, including mining and energy sectors. Stability and performance of all these facilities greatly depend on ground strength, compressibility characteristics of soils and rocks, and geoenvironmental factors. For analysis and design of ground/geotechnical facilities and foundations, especially during planning and preliminary design stages, the project engineers and other professionals need basic geotechnical and geological details of the project ground sites with subsurface characteristics of soils and rocks, and groundwater table location without a detailed site investigation. They also need to know about availability and properties of geomaterials (soils, rocks and other similar materials such as coal ashes and mine tailings), their use a construction material, geoenvironmental impacts on geomaterials, damaging effects of natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes, floods) on ground/geotechnical structures, and case studies on the ground/geotechnical structures. In view of these essential project requirements, this book series has been designed to provide geotechnical characteristics of soils and rocks with related information, including relevant geological and geoenvironmental details of geomaterials and subsurface characteristics of the ground as we see around the world in different countries. These books will include values of specific properties of geomaterials obtained from the project site investigations and laboratory/field tests as available. Any book in this series may have 5-10 chapters within about 150-300 printed pages. The first chapter of every book may cover basic details and structure of the book. Each chapter, contributed by a team of authors, will follow a well-designed common chapter template for maintaining the consistency of technical details and high-quality presentation.