SoFSI has been designed to permit near-scale research into all infrastructure which interacts with soil (i.e. buildings, bridges, tunnels, offshore wind turbines etc.) in urban, rural and offshore environments.
The key research areas for this category include single piles and pile groups in soft soil, foundations of tall buildings, building-tunnel interaction, dynamic SSI in high frequencies, quantification of soil damping, pile corrosion and liquefaction.
Our geotechnics team has an international reputation in the understanding of the fundamentals of soil behaviour. This has been achieved through research investigations spanning across length scales, from micro to macro, from soils to structures, from gravitational loads to cyclic, dynamic and blasts. Our existing soils laboratories possess several stress-path triaxial cells as well as a unique set of multiaxial soil-test apparatus: true triaxial (independent variation of three principal stresses with rigid boundaries), cubical cell (independent variation of three principal stresses with flexible boundaries) and hollow cylindrical torsional apparatus (independent variation of four stress variables). The facilities at SoFSI augment this by enabling near scale model testing to explore the dynamic behaviour of monopile and pile group foundations, both static and dynamic testing within the soil pit and also through the use of a laminar soil box on our 50t capacity shaking table.