Soil Mechanics Unsw
Nickie Koskinen
Professor Russell has expertise in the areas of soil mechanics, rock mechanics, microstructure, geotechnical science, geotechnical engineering, unsaturated soils, soil-structure interactions, shallow foundations, retaining walls, physical modelling, analytical modelling, constitutive modelling, cone penetration testing, in situ testing, fibre reinforcement, granular media, particle mechanics, morphology, fractals, particle crushing, particle breakage, tailings, liquefaction, geotechnical earthquake engineering.
As a geotechnical engineer, Russell looks to understand how infrastructure such as tailings storages, buildings, foundations, roads, tunnels, bridges, railways and ports interact with the ground. His research interests include soil mechanics, rock mechanics and the mechanics of fibre reinforced geomaterials and their use in infrastructure to increase strength and failure resistance. Able to recognise the value of academic-industry partnerships, a number of his research ideas have been successfully implemented within industry including the development of a new type of soil-cement-fibre mix technology for use in retaining wall systems to reduce cost and embodied carbon in partnership with Wagstaff Piling Pty Ltd, and the development of a technique to prevent blockages in ore passes in partnership with Glencore Pty Ltd.
Professor Russell is always interested to hear from people who are considering pursuing a PhD. He currently leads a research group comprising 1 Research Associate and 5 PhD students working in the research areas of:
The skills and expertise his PhD students obtain equip them for successful academic careers. One of his former students (Diambra) is a Professor at the University of Bristol, UK, one (Sufian) is Senior Lecturer at UNSW, one (Masoumi) is Associate Professor at Monash University, one (Yang) is Associate Professor at Sun Yat-Sen University. Another (Hadsari) is Lecturer at the Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Five others are Research Associates at the University of Warwick (Vo) and Loughborough University (Li) in the UK, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand (Yates), Taiyuan University of Technology in China (Zhang), and the Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute in China (Tang).
His main area of research is numerical modelling of multi-phase porous media. He has developed a Meshfree based computer program (in FORTRAN) for the coupled analysis of flow and deformation in unsaturated soils including large deformations and hydraulic hysteresis. The formulation and the program he has developed can be used for modelling existing Geotechnical structures like earth dams and natural/manmade slopes. His other research concerns dynamics and micro-mechanics of unsaturated soils, and characterisation of soil water retention curve (SWRC) in deformable soils.
Academic Career: John was promoted to a personal chair at the University of Sydney in 1990 and appointed as its Challis Professor in Civil Engineering in 1999. From 1989 until 2005 he was the Director of the Centre for Geotechnical Research and from 1995 until 1999 he served as Head of the Department of Civil Engineering. In 2004 he was elected as Chair of the Academic Board at the University of Sydney, a senior position that placed him as one of the Principal Officers of the university with major responsibilities for academic governance. In February 2006 he took up an appointment as the Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment at the University of Newcastle, Australia, a position he held until his retirement in April 2013. He is now an emeritus professor at the University of Newcastle and an independent consultant.
Professional Contributions: John is a former National Chair of the Australian Geomechanics Society (AGS). He held elected positions on the Sydney Chapter of AGS and its National Committee for 20 years from 1990 to 2009. He was invited by AGS to deliver the E.H. Davis Lecture in 2005 and the J.C. Jaeger Lecture in 2015. He was nominated by AGS as the Vice-President for Australia New Zealand of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (2005-2009). He is currently chair of the AGS Local Organising Committee for the International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, to be held in Sydney in September 2021.
Research: John has more than 40 years of experience in teaching, research and consulting in civil, geotechnical and offshore engineering. His research interests include analytical and numerical modelling, constitutive modelling of soil and rock, soil-structure interaction, rock mechanics, the behaviour of cemented and uncemented carbonate soils, tunnelling, soft soil engineering, ground improvement and offshore foundations. He has attracted more than AUD30 million in competitive research funding and been associated with development projects attracting additional grants of more than AUD4 million. He is the author of more than four hundred refereed technical papers in geotechnical engineering and engineering mechanics, covering a diverse range of topics from theoretical mechanics to experimental applications.
Consulting: John has consulted widely to industry on a range of geotechnical projects including soft clay foundations, offshore foundations, retaining walls, buried structures and tunnelling. He has also been retained as a consultant on numerous offshore foundation problems for major oil and gas companies. He has acted as an expert witness for courts in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. In the period 2018-20 he advised the NSW government on the Opal Tower and Mascot Tower incidents in Sydney. In 2019 he was appointed by the Governor of Queensland as a Commissioner of the Paradise Dam Inquiry. From 1995 until December 2013 he was a consultant director of Advanced Geomechanics, a geotechnical engineering consultancy based in Perth, Western Australia, providing specialist advice to the oil and gas sector on foundation problems and on-shore and offshore site investigations.
Engagement: John has also been involved in the commercialization of research and the marketing of its outcomes, including his own specialist geotechnical software. Between 1997 and 2000 he was a director, representing the interests of the University of Sydney, of Benthic GeoTech Pty Ltd, a joint venture company that conceived, designed, built and now operates PROD, the Portable Remotely Operated Drill, which is used in water depths out to 2000 m to penetrate the ocean floor in order to conduct in situ tests and recover core samples from the sea floor. He is a former Director and Chairman of UoN Singapore, a controlled entity of the University of Newcastle, responsible for delivering its degree programs in Singapore. In May 2008 he was appointed by the New South Wales State Treasurer as a member of the Board of Newcastle Port Corporation, a position he held until the Port of Newcastle was privatised in June 2014. In 2009 he became a Graduate Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is currently a director of Engineering Aid Australia, a not-for-profit organization that supports and encourages Indigenous Australians to study engineering.
While it has been common practice for different constitutive models to be proposed for different categories of geomaterials, e.g., clays, sands, and silts, and even for the same material with different structures, recent attempts have been made to find unifying constitutive models that apply to any type of geomaterial. This chapter describes a method that has the potential to provide a unified soil constitutive model. In particular, a simple but very general compression model for structured geomaterials is suggested based on the disturbed state concept. It is demonstrated that this general compression model can successfully simulate the volumetric behavior of a very wide range of structured geomaterials over a large range of stress. These geomaterials include clays; sands; gravels; calcareous soils; soft rocks; and reinforced, cemented, chemically treated and contaminated soils.
In most tunnelling projects in urban areas, a preliminary assessment is often required of the impact of a tunnel excavation on foundations adjacent to the tunnel. Despite the significant recent advances in computer hardware and commercial software, a full 3-D analysis is still relatively costly, especially if it is to be employed as a preliminary assessment tool to ascertain the impact of tunnel excavation on existing foundations. This paper provides a convenient and cost-effective design tool, in the form of design charts, that will allow an economical preliminary assessment of the 3-D effects of tunnelling on a single pile. The method adopted to develop these design charts will be briefly described and their use in practice will be illustrated by application of the design charts to several published case histories.
A selective review is provided of the methods and solutions used to predict the response of various geomaterials in cavity expansion problems, both cylindrical and spherical cavities. As many authors have recognized, the solutions to these problems have numerous applications in geotechnics, and the more significant of these have been addressed in this paper. Some of the more important solutions already available in the literature are presented in addition to some novel results illustrating the effects of some unique features of soil behaviour, such as softening, rate-dependency, density dependent response and dilation. Some of the solutions are available in closed form, while others have required the use of numerical methods such as the finite element method. It is contended that the relatively simple problem of cavity expansion, be it either a cylindrical or a spherical cavity, is capable of revealing important aspects of the mechanical behaviour captured in both simplified and complex soil constitutive models.
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