The principal investigator currently has an NSF grant to allow him to study earth pressures that are developed on support systems for deep excavations, e.g., for deep basements of major buildings in cities, and for subways. He is taking field measurements, obtaining soil samples and measuring their physical properties, and performing theoretical analyses. This grant is to provide funds to purchase two items of specialized soil testing equipment that are needed to measure relevant physical properties of the soil samples. These resulting soil properties will then be incorporated into the analyses to develop better methods of predicting earth pressures at design time.
