Short Courses

Short Course 4: Estimation of soil properties for foundation design
                      by Professor Fred H. Kulhawy, Ph.D., P.E., G.E., Honorary Member ASCE

The Subject and Course
Soil property estimation is fundamental to all of geotechnical design.  On large projects with relatively generous budgets, all of the required field and laboratory tests can be conducted to evaluate the necessary geotechnical properties for design.  For all other projects, testing will be more limited, and some properties will have to be estimated using correlations.  Under the sponsorship of EPRI and other funding agencies, significant research has been conducted at Cornell to assess soil property correlations in a realistic manner, including the uncertainty in each correlation.  However, the results of these efforts are not yet available in traditional types of reference sources such as texts and manuals.

In this short course, much of this technology is presented within a consistent, coherent, and practical framework.  The general topics covered include the following:  soil property evaluation strategy, geologic inference in property assessment, usage of in-situ tests, relative density assessment, in-situ stress evaluation, soil strength evaluation, and deformability estimation.

For this course, comprehensive notes are used that facilitate technology transfer.  These include organized copies of the course presentation materials and supplemental readings to provide further details.  The course duration is one day.

The Instructor
Professor Fred H. Kulhawy, Ph.D., P.E., G.E., Honorary Member ASCE
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Graduate Faculty of Geological Sciences
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA

Professor Kulhawy is a well-known educator, consultant, and researcher, who has received numerous prestigious awards for his work from ASCE, ADSC, IEEE, and others, including election to Honorary Membership of ASCE and the ASCE Karl Terzaghi Award and Norman Medal. He is the senior faculty in Geotechnical Engineering at Cornell, and he has lectured widely, giving over 1180 presentations around the world.  His teaching and research has focused on foundations, soil-structure interaction, reliability, soil and rock behavior, and geotechnical computer applications.  As a consultant, he has had extensive experience on six continents, with much of his experience dealing with foundation engineering and soil/rock property evaluation.  In research, he has pioneered on many fronts, most notably with drilled shafts and property evaluation since the mid-1970s.  His research on these topics constitutes a majority of this course.