Mechanics of Residual Soils, Second Edition

Residual soils are found in many parts of the world and are used extensively as construction materials for roads, embankments and dams, and to support the foundations of buildings, bridges and load-bearing pavements. The characteristics and engineering properties of residual soils can differ significantly from those of the more familiar transported soils. The fact that residual soils occur often in areas with tropical and sub-tropical climates and (extensively) in semi-arid climates, adds another dimension to their engineering performance, that of unsaturation.

Although there are many books that deal with the mechanics of soils, these are based mainly on the characteristics and behaviour of saturated transported soils. The first edition of this book was the first book to be written specifically about the mechanics of residual soils. The book was prepared by a panel of authors drawn from the Technical Committee on Tropical and Residual Soils of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering. It was written as a practical professional guide for geotechnical engineers working with residual soils.

The second edition has retained the valuable information contained in the first edition. The present editors and authors have extensively revised and augmented the content to bring it completely up to date, adding significantly to the sections on unsaturated soil mechanics and expanding the range and number of instructive case histories. Furthermore, sections on pedocretes, dispersive soils and karst have been added.

Geoffrey Blight completed his PhD at Imperial College, London, on the mechanics of unsaturated soils, under the supervision of the legendary Alan Bishop. His early work, published jointly with Bishop in 1960, 1961 and 1963, provided data that is still being used by new generations of researchers on unsaturated soil behaviour. He soon became interested in residual soils, publishing his first work on unsaturated residual soils in 1963. He served as Chairman of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering’s Technical Committee on the Properties of Tropical and Residual Soils from 1994 to 1997 and edited and co-authored the book "Mechanics of Residual Soils", produced during his Chairmanship.

Eng-Choon Leong is an Associate Professor at School of Civil Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He obtained his bachelors and masters degrees at the National University of Singapore and a PhD at the University of Western Australia. He has eighteen years of research and teaching experience in Geotechnical Engineering. His research interests are unsaturated soils, residual soils, soil dynamics, foundation engineering and numerical modeling. He has published widely in international journals and conferences. He has extensive experience in laboratory and field testing of saturated and unsaturated soils and in-situ monitoring of residual soil slopes. He has also developed a number of specialized laboratory testing apparatuses and data acquisition systems for field applications. He is also active in consultancy and national technical committees on standards. He has received several awards for his contribution to the accreditation of commercial soil testing laboratories and is a co-author of the ASTM Outstanding Article on the Practice of Geotechnical Engineering awarded in 2006.