Title:Emerging Trends in Geophysical and Geotechnical Site Investigations and Instrumentation

Time: Dec 11, 15:00

Venue: Conference Room, Building NO.7, Wushan Campus

Speaker: Everett Tabor

Welcome all the teachers and students to attend this lecture!

Speaker Introduction:

 Approximately 25 years of experience combining the disciplines and professions of geotechnical engineering, geophysics, geology, and engineering geology.  Continuously pursuing modern applications and multi-disciplinary approaches to meet challenges of our industry and improve project efficiency and quality.  Recognized effective team builder and coordinator of inter-disciplinary professionals.  Past and future goals include finding the most practical and innovative approaches to challenging projects by understanding and combining skills of several professions. 

Lecture introduction:

Geophysical surveys and geotechnical investigations employ different elements with generally the same goal.  One of the more common challenges when planning a site exploration, or a characterization survey, is being faced   with the need to pursue unfamiliar options.  With greater awareness and rapidly increasing technology, specialized applications are becoming more familiar, available, and cost-effective.  Specialized geophysical testing, monitoring instrumentation setup, and planning require specialized education and training, in order to perform many methods considered new to a given entity.  Individuals will need to learn and be trained in techniques and survey planning.  This has been an expensive task in the past, but with modern equipment, and even new techniques with traditional equipment, cost and training hours have been greatly reduced.  Equipment and software are now easier to learn, allowing geophysical surveys and monitoring instrumentation planning to be added to the programs of many organizations. Notable advancements that invite increased applications have occurred in the areas of: Ground Penetrating Radar with simultaneously operating multi-frequency antennas and automated mapping; automated instrumentation monitoring arrays conveying ‘real-time’ and wide varieties of nearly continuous data streams to central collection points; low-cost deep geologic soundings using Controlled Source Audio Magnetotellurics (CSAMT) allowing for measurements of soil properties from roughly 20 to 400 meters below the surface; and  seismic shear wave acquisition and data processing techniques which have advanced and made the technology available for routine and cost-effective applications of profiling sites and collecting data for geotechnical dynamic design criteria.  As these methods have improved, so has the ability for combining methods to reach higher degrees of certainty of subsurface interpretations.  The increased availability of these technologies allow for new levels of coverage for site investigations, site monitoring, and detailed cost-effective explorations along geographically large projects.  This presentation includes summarized examples of challenging projects where the aforementioned applications have been used to accomplish difficult goals within project time limits and budgets.