**Prof. Dr Sayed Hemeda**

**Chapter 1**

Introductory Chapter:

in Emerging Fields

**1. New advances in geotechnical engineering**

achieves these requirements during the lifetime of the project.

*Mehmet Barış Can Ülker*

analytical methods.

each topic in recent years is also given.

Geotechnical Engineering in a

Broad Perspective - New Advances

Geotechnical engineering is the branch of civil engineering that studies soils, structures, or structural components residing on or inside these soils. The mechanics of soils provides the necessary physical attributes to be used to understand the mechanisms that play a key role in what happens to soils under external effects, such as those induced by structural loads or changes in the water content. Thus, soil mechanics is mainly interested in the deformation characteristics of soils such that failure loads can be predicted more accurately. Therefore, it is more convenient and perhaps more accurate to think of the problem as a soil-structure system which is composed of a porous soil medium (as a soil profile with number of layers) and a foundation or another geotechnical engineering structure. As for the design of such soil-structure systems, settlement and the ultimate bearing capacity become the two major criteria that must be satisfied to withstand any external static or dynamic load. Once such stability criteria are set, it is expected that any soil-structure system

Geotechnical engineering consists of the collection of subfields in a wide range of practical problems related to soils, rocks, slopes, foundations, walls, etc. While the principles of soil mechanics is the ultimate cookbook, recipe for each problem changes, and the engineers who are the chefs of the practice must be able to deduce the most edible and desired cuisine (i.e., engineering solution) employing their ultimate material, mathematics. As the current technology is advancing, it is more and more common that such engineering solutions follow the emerging technology that can be incorporated into geotechnical engineering research and practice to develop the most efficient, most viable, and most accurate solution. In order to achieve such an elaborate task, we, as geotechnical engineers, still make use of three tools at our disposal: (i) experimental methods, (ii) numerical methods, and (iii)

In this introductory chapter, three emerging fields of geotechnical engineering where there have been significant developments in the last couple of decades are touched upon. Those are the (i) numerical methods in geotechnical engineering, (ii) unsaturated soils, and (iii) offshore geotechnics. A short summary of the basic notion of what each field mainly investigates and what has been recently done in

Professor in Geotechnical Engineering and Architectural Preservation of Historic Buildings, Faculty of Archaeology, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt
