Competence of the laboratory
The Soil Mechanics Laboratory provides hands-on experience to students studying soil mechanics and foundation engineering. The laboratory is equipped with the basic soil testing apparatus. Students perform their investigations or design work individually or in teams. As part of the course work, students learn basic analytical laboratory skills, like preparing samples, scaling, or conducting basic laboratory tests. The size of the laboratory allows to accommodate about twenty students.
The test results with the related calculations are processed individually by the students. At the end of the semester, students report all the conducted tests in a soil mechanics report. Using these test results they also prepare a soil mechanics recommendation for a given engineering project.
Equipments of the laboratory
● Hand-operated borehole drilling machine (BORRO),
● Different types of precision scales,
● Heating and drying ovens up to 600 °C,
● Sieves for grain-size distribution test,
● Hydrometer analysis,
● Atterberg Limits, Liquid Limit Devices, Casagrande apparatus, Cone penetrometer test, Plastic limit sets, Shrinkage limit sets,
● Constant-head permeability test,
● Falling-head permeability test,
● Proctor compaction test equipment and CBR,
● Dead-weight consolidation and compression machine,
● Direct shear box.
