Geotechnical, Soil Dynamics & Geoenvironmental Laboratory Facilities

The geotechnical group has three on-campus laboratory facilities devoted to geotechnical testing. The Geotechnical laboratory is equipped with all standard geotechnical testing equipment, and is used during the entire academic year for undergraduate education.

The F.E. Richard Soil Dynamics Laboratory is a fully equipped geotechnical laboratory with specialized testing equipment to determine the dynamic properties of soils, and includes a CKC Cyclic Triaxial Machine, GCTS Resonant Column and Cyclic Triaxial Device, a Reich Quasi-Static Tensional Simple Shear/Resonant Column apparatus, a Geocomp Constant Rate of Strain Consolidation Device and a Wykeham Farrance Triaxial Stress Path Device.

The CKC Cyclic Triaxial Machine allows isotropic stress and anisotropic stress cyclic trail tests to be performed, either stress or strain controlled. The Reich Quasi-Static Tensional Simple Shear/Resonant Column Apparatus allows a large amplitude quasi-static extension strain to be imposed on soil specimen, while the soil sample is subjected to a low amplitude variable frequency tensional cyclic stress.

The Geoenvironmental Engineering Laboratory is presently under construction, and it is to be completed in October 2009. This laboratory will be outfitted with specialty equipment for characterization and testing of waste materials. The facility is designed to operate under negative pressure and will be continuously ventilated by an active system to ensure the health and safety of the users, and to prevent migration of odors outside the controlled perimeter. The facility will host the waste characterization and testing activities.

The Michigan facilities also allow for testing physical models (in-door sand pit facility).  The laboratory offers space for housing physical models, specialized equipment, and specimens.   The geotechnical laboratories are housed in the same building where the PI, co‑PI, and the Graduate Assistant have their offices.

Geotechnical Field Testing Facilities

The Geotechnical Group also operates a 20 ton cone penetration test (CPT) rig (7 ton dead weight) for classroom instruction and research. The fully equipped system contains state-of-the-art real-time data acquisition equipment for seismic cone and vision cone penetration testing.  The rig is also used for soil sampling and flat plate dilatometer testing. Research using this CPT equipment has been conducted in the Bay area of California, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, the New Madrid seismic zone, the Wasatch Range in Utah, and on the eastern seaboard of the US.

The geotechnical group also owns and operates equipment for the performance of active and passive source measurement of surface wave velocities using the Multichannel Analyses of Surface Waves (MASW) technique. The technique allows the development of 1-D and 2-D shear wave velocity profiles.

Computational Facilities

The College of Engineering at the University of Michigan supports the Computer Aided Engineering Network (CAEN), which makes a multitude of workstations and PCs available to both students and faculty.  A large choice of software is available on this network, including general-purpose finite element packages: NASTRAN, ABAQUS, ANSYS, PATRAN, and IDEAS.  The computer network also offers facilities for storage, management, distribution, digitization, and scientific visualization of experimental data and analytical results, as well as data processing (using packages such as MATLAB). The geotechnical group also owns licenses for programs such as Geo-studio (Seep/W, Shake/W, Slope/W), Plaxis VIP, FLAC 3D, DMOD 2000 and Shake 2000.