Proceedings of the International Conference on Creep and Deformation Characteristics in Geomaterials, 24-25 August 2015, Gothenburg, Sweden

Edited book, 2015

Geotechnical engineering often involves designing structures built on, in or of natural or improved soils. Increasingly, long-term behaviour needs to be accounted for in the consideration of stability and deformation of geotechnical structures. In the context of major infrastructure projects, long-term refers to a period of decades. Given that the soil often governs the response of geotechnical structures, an in-depth understanding of the material behaviour is of paramount importance. An additional complication is that the material response is influenced by the stress history of the material, resulting from geological, environmental and building processes. The fact that natural soils are complex geomaterials makes analysis of geotechnical problems challenging. In particular, the rate-dependent behaviour in clays, peats and frozen soils is poorly captured in existing models, both on the particulate level and on the continuum scale. The aim of the conference is to provide an international forum for presenting and discussing the latest developments in modelling, monitoring, analysing and managing long-term deformations in geotechnical engineering. Creep and rate-dependency is also an important mechanism in other engineering materials, such as concrete and polymers. Active discussion will be facilitated through a contribution of keynote presentations and submitted contributions. The invited keynote presenters are: Prof. Efraín Ovando-Shelley (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico), Prof. Itai Einav (The University of Sydney, Australia), Prof. Pierre-Yves Hicher (École Centrale de Nantes, France) and Prof. Kenneth Runesson (Chalmers University of Technology). Given most academics want to publish their original research in international scientific journals, we have opted for extended abstracts only, available in Open Access. The proceedings contains some highlights of the research done under the CREEP project, achieved through intense collaboration between industry and academia, as well as contributions from other parties interested in the topic.