Speaker Dr. Ankit GARG Assistant Professor Department of Civil Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Abstract The use of vegetation as root reinforcement for man- made slope stabilization has received considerable attention in past decades. However, its another aspect of root water uptake induced soil suction and root induced changes in soil properties (i.e., soil water characteristic curve) is generally overlooked. Soil suction is important as it increases shear strength of unsaturated soil and also reduces permeability. Experiments have been performed in both laboratory (atmospheric controlled) and natural (field condition) to understand the influence of root water uptake on soil suction. A new Embankment was constructed with silty sand and vegetated with two different types of species i.e., Bermuda grass (Cynodon ...

Speaker Prof. Xiang-Song LI Professor Emeritus Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Abstract In granular mechanics, macroscopic approaches treat a granular material as a continuum at macro-scale, and study its constitutive relationship between stresses and strains. On the other hand, microscopic approaches consider a granular material as an assembly of individual particles interacting with each other at micro-scale, and the physical quantities under study are forces and displacements. This presentation will focus on the macroscopic quantification of the internal structure in terms of the fabric tensor. The correlations among different fabric tensors and their relations with the stress–strain behavior will be discussed. Biography Professor Emeritus of Hong Kong University of Science and ...