This book presents the select proceedings of the 26th Annual Symposium organized by the Sydney Chapter of the Australian Geomechanics Society (AGS). The symposium brought together key stakeholders of the Australian geological and geotechnical community. This book showcases state-of-the-art practices, new research findings, and case histories that demonstrate reliability-based designs and assessments. The papers on reliability-based approaches cover various aspects of site investigations, interpretations, designs, specialized testing, and technologies. This book presents recent innovations, trends, and concerns, as well as practical challenges encountered, and solutions adopted in the field. This volume will be a useful guide to those in academia and industry working in the fields of geotechnical engineering.
Prof. Hadi Khabbaz has conducted original research in ground modification, unsaturated soil mechanics, tunnelling, and transport geotechnics. He has been involved in design of civil infrastructure and soil behaviour modelling research for over 25 years. His research has been focused on the theoretical and numerical analysis of problematic soils, underground spaces, granular particles, and unsaturated porous media with strong applications to real-life engineering problems. He has made several significant contributions in the field of unsaturated soil mechanics and ground improvement techniques with fundamental and pioneering nature. His early work on unsaturated soil mechanics has been increasingly cited in literature and considered as a significant contribution to the field. He has sound numerical, experimental, and programming skills. His research output and publications on geotechnical aspects of rail track foundations overlying soft soil is also extensive. He is a technical reviewer of many international journals and several research organizations.
Prof. Cholachat Rujikiatkamjorn is Professor at the Transport Research Centre, School of Civil, and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His key areas of expertise include ground improvement for transport infrastructure and soft soil engineering. He has published over 270 articles in international journals and conferences. While maintaining a strong focus on quality teaching, to date, he has secured over $2 million in research funding, mostly from external sources. He is currently a CI of one ARC-DP project, 3 ARC-LP projects, an ITTC Rail, and a CRC-Rail project. He is currently Supervisor/Co-supervisor of 10 HDR students and 4 Research Associates. His research achievements over the years and involvement in Port of Brisbane reclamation were the main driving force in the introduction of new Australian Standards (AS8700) on Vertical Drains in Soft Soils.
Dr. Ali Parsa is Associate Geotechnical Engineer with more than 18 years of experience. After 6 years of industry experience, he joined University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2009 and worked on an industry (i.e. Menard) sponsored project incorporated different aspects of soft soil improvement. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2014, He re-joined industry and since then has worked in infrastructure and construction sectors and had involvement in delivery of more than 150 projects including major infrastructure projects. In the last several years, he has collaborated with leading multidisciplinary companies, many engineers from other design disciplines, variety of clients/authorities and major joint ventures in Australia. He has also been involved with several R&D programmes and development of new approaches to deliver efficient & robust designs for challenging geotechnical problems.
