Experimental Soil Mechanics

Rating:
Summary: Much more than experimental procedures
Review: Usually, books on the subject of experimental soil mechanics focus on laboratory procedures. This book, however, goes well beyond the procedures (which are neatly explained and illustrated with high quality photographs) and provides tools to process the resulting data with the help of common computer software.

Those two features could be enough to make it an excellent choice for a textbook in experimental soil mechanics, but the author gives much more than that. The book provides the complete and solid theoretical background for each one of the experiments, such as the consolidation theory, the analysis of stresses in a soil mass, and the foundations of the strength of soils, etc., before introducing the respective test procedures. This is a very useful reference for teachers and students and very effective as a way to link theory and experiment.

Besides all that, the book includes a detailed compilation of data about the soil properties that are studied in each experiment, common empirical correlations with other parameters or properties (with a critical point of view), and exercises with real case data.

Although all this material is not new and can be found in several reference books, this is perhaps the first one that puts it all together with the plus of the software tools that make the data interpretation work much easier.