时间：2012年9月14日（周五）下午13：30

地点：岩土楼207

Professor David Toll

School of Engineering and Computing Sciences

Durham University, UK

    Abstract: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides convincing evidence of global warming as a result of increased greenhouse gas production. There has been a greater occurrence of extreme climate events in recent decades. We need to ensure that our buildings and infrastructure can cope with such events and possibly more extreme events in the future. A good grounding in unsaturated soil mechanics will be necessary to understand future changes involving the drying and desiccation of soils that will occur in dry seasons and the wetting and infiltration processes that prevail during wet seasons. To predict the impacts of climate change will require the use of robust numerical modelling of climate/soil interactions that can be used to model the effects of future climate regimes. To achieve this we need high quality field observations involving climate/soil interaction that can be used to validate the models. This lecture describes how a unique facility for engineering and biological research was established in the North East of England through the BIONICS Project (Biological and Engineering Impacts of Climate Change on Slopes). It describes the building and monitoring of a full-scale embankment representative of road/rail embankments in the UK. The lecture will present the instrumentation and the results of monitoring of pore-water pressure carried out 2007-2009.

    Biodata: Professor David Toll has been carrying out research into unsaturated soils for 30 years. He was one of the first to set out a critical state framework for unsaturated soils in 1990. He has published extensively on the shear strength and volume change behaviour of unsaturated soils. The application of his research is primarily in rainfall-induced landslides and the impacts of climate change on slopes. He is a member of the ISSMGE Technical Committee TC106 on Unsaturated Soils and is also Chair of Joint Technical Committee JTC2 on Representation of Geo-Engineering Data in Electronic Form. He has been an organisor of Conferences on Unsaturated Soils and Information Technology in both Asia and Europe. Dr Toll has held Visiting Professor or Research Fellow posts at National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, University of Western Australia and University of Newcastle, Australia. Professor Toll was founding editor of the international journal Geotechnical & Geological Engineering and is a member of editorial boards for the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology and Géotechnique Symposia in Print.