Geotechnical Engineering – Page 18

Reconstructing a Soviet-Era Plastic Model to Predict Vibratory Pile Driving Performance — vulcanhammer.info

Posted on 22 March 2021 by Don Warrington

The latest in our series of monographs on vibratory pile drivers, this one takes us back to the beginnings of vibratory pile driving in the Soviet Union. It was prepared for the ReSEARCH Dialogues at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in April 2021. The vibratory driver that started it all: the Soviet BT-5, used […]
Reconstructing a Soviet-Era Plastic Model to Predict Vibratory Pile Driving Performance — vulcanhammer.info

Academic Issues, Civil Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering

My Review for the FE Exam Civil/Geotechnical Section

Posted on 17 March 202130 August 2026 by Don Warrington

Over the years, my department has asked me to give a review session for my students before they take the FE exam. In this time of COVID, I’ve committed all my other lectures to video, and this one is now no exception:

The slide presentation that goes with this is here.

I mention a few of things in the intro I’d like to elaborate on:

About ten years ago, it was brought to my attention that my students weren’t doing well on the FE Exam geotechnical section. My response to that was simple: “I’ll fix that problem.” I did that by aligning what I taught in class with what was in the FE “cheat sheet” (I’m sure NCEES loves that designation.) I don’t subscribe to the idea that we should only be “teaching to the test” but the FE exam’s geotechnical requirements are pretty basic, so that wasn’t much of a conflict. What has been tricky is that they’ve shifted around what they require over the years. But my students’ performance on the test has improved.
Since COVID I’ve put my lectures online. If you need to investigate some topics in detail, I’ve got them either at my Soil Mechanics or Foundations pages.
Once you’ve digested what’s presented in the video, you can and should solve sample problems. I just don’t recommend that you start your preparation doing that.

Geotechnical Engineering

An Overview of Compaction Equipment, from DM 7

Posted on 4 March 2021 by Don Warrington

Below are some charts for selecting compaction equipment for a given project and soil condition, from NAVFAC DM 7.02

Charts for Selecting Compaction Equipment, from NAVFAC DM 7.02

You can order NAVFAC DM 7.02–and 7.01–for this and more valuable information by clicking here.

Geotechnical Engineering, Soil Mechanics

Principal Soil Deposits, from NAVFAC DM 7

Posted on 16 February 2021 by Don Warrington

A nice summary of the types of soil deposits we find in the earth, including sedimentary and transported soils.

You can find more information on ordering NAVFAC DM 7 here.

Academic Issues, Geotechnical Engineering

Ohio DOT’s Rendition of the AASHTO Classification System

Posted on 13 February 2021 by Don Warrington

With the Unified soil classification system, there are many ways of diagramming it. One of those was presented in the last post. With the AASHTO system, there’s generally only one, as shown in the Soils and Foundations Reference Manual. For classification this is pretty much it, but it’s not very informative when it comes to getting a “feel” for what these classifications mean.

Below is a chart from the Ohio Department of Transportation (about the only DOT I know of which uses the AASHTO system for just about everything they do) which describes each AASHTO classification in words and attempts to describe the type of soil for each type in the system.