Soil Mechanics Laboratory

The Soil Mechanics Laboratory shares a surface area of 1,840 square feet with the Civil Engineering Materials Laboratory. It is equipped with modern laboratory equipment that supports simultaneous practice of up to four student groups. With newly purchased laboratory equipment, a total of six student groups will be supported beginning in AY 2008-09.  The laboratory is equipped with consolidation apparatuses, a direct/residual shear apparatus with 650 lb and 1000 lb proving rings and a data acquisition unit, two California Bearing Ratio (CBR) test machines with 6000 lb and 11200 lb proving rings and a data acquisition unit, a triaxial test set for shear strength parameters of granular or cohesive soils, and a 10 kips maximum capacity load frame for unconfined compression test set with digital readout unit and 500 lb capacity load cell. Other standard laboratory equipment is available for carrying out variety of tests for the determination of soil physical properties, permeability, compaction and strength characteristics. In addition, the soil mechanics laboratory is provided with the state of the art data acquisition unit and DS7 testing software which enables 24 hour unsupervised logging thus reducing the chance of errors possible while taking manual readings.