Appraisal of Friction Coefficients Between TBM and Conditioned Soil: A Laboratory Investigation Adopting a Direct Shear Apparatus

During the advance of a tunnel boring machine (TBM), the torque applied to rotate the cutterhead must overcome the resisting moments acting on it. Hence, one of the major concerns of TBM design is to determine the torque and power requirements of the excavation machine. The first empirical approach for torque estimation was developed in the 80’s...

Transport of Ions Through Clays of the Peize and Waalre Formation

High-level waste can be radiotoxic for thousands of years and should be carefully handled to prevent accidents. The research for geological disposal of radioactive waste focuses on the construction and durability of a geologic disposal facility in Dutch clays or salts. One of the challenges is assessing these host rocks’ capability to retard...

A parametric study on the bounding surface SANICALY model for cyclic behaviour of Kaolin clay

Cyclic loading tends to affect the strength and stiffness parameters of soils, degrade its structure and results in accumulation of the excess pore water pressure. Such behaviour often leads to premature failure of the soils. Over the past few decades, geotechnical research community has developed numerous constitutive models to predict the...

Stability assessment of the landside slope cover on clay flood embankments in the Netherlands

Large parts of the Netherlands are vulnerable to flooding. Due to the great impact that a flood would have for the Dutch society, The flood safety standards are very strict, which means that the required failure probability of flood defences is very low. To keep the flood risk within acceptable limits of the hinterland, flood embankments are...

Trench Siltation near the ETM of a Well-mixed Estuary

To exploit its socio-economic functions, engineering measures are regularly applied in estuaries. Estuaries are, however, known to be very complex systems. Stemming from this complexity is the generation of a so-called estuarine turbidity maximum (ETM), which poses great siltation problems to the engineering measures. An engineering measure,...

Digital Earthen Shelters: Additively Manufacturing Mass Customized Refugee Shelters Using On-Site Earthen Materials

Continued humanitarian crises have caused the amount of forcibly displaced people to increase rapidly in recent years, creating an urgent need for constructing adequate sheltering to house the displaced. Governments and international organizations attempt to accommodate the growing demands by subsidizing and mass producing temporary transitional...

Robotic 3DPrinting Earth: Earthen additive manufacturing with customized nozzles to create a gradient material for on-demand performance

To cope with the climate crisis, sustainable and eco-friendly buildings are a necessity. To achieve this, we need to change the way we build, this accounts as well for construction materials. For thousands of years, humans have lived in clay and timber hybrid constructions. These hybrids are made of sustainable, possibly circular, highly...

3D Printing Clay Facade Walls: Integrating Ventilation systems into printing process

Since 3D printing is relatively new in the architecture applications, exploring how it could be integrated with environment-friendly materials as clay could lead to a more sustainable approach for materialising complex building components.<br/>This research is investigating the answer to the research question “What are the printing techniques...