Strategy
The Group's research strategy recognises that:
Funding opportunities are shifting from traditional areas of geotechnical research to areas associated with environmental engineering and environmental impact. There are now huge investment programmes in the UK relating to the identification and remediation of contaminated land, and 85% of contaminated land in the UK is in the north-west of England: priority areas include nuclear installation decommissioning and radioactive waste contamination. The Geotechnics Research Group currently has links with NWDA (via the Environlink North West Active Networks), BNFL, North West Chemical Industry (e.g. ICI, Shell) and various North West consultants.
There is a demand for an increased understanding of the processes involved in geotechnical and geo-environmental problems, for associated risks to be quantified explicitly and for design codes to address these needs. Therefore, geotechnical and, in particular, geo-environmental problems, need to be investigated probabilistically/stochastically.
There is a growing recognition that the scale-dependent properties of geologic media are important, and that state-of-the-art experimental methods are unable to predict meso-scale properties from micro-scale measurements. Meso-scale experiments bridge the gap between elemental experiments and field observations, and provide the data necessary for the calibration of predictive stochastic models.