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Since 1973 the Geotechnical Section of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of University of Florence is involved in teaching and research activities. Our activities Teaching activities include:
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Research activities fall within a wide range covering Geotechnical Engineering and Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering and are centred on the assessment of geotechnical risks in buildings and environment, due to foundation problems, settlements, slope and retaining wall instability, environmental impacts, seismic site effects, soil liquefaction, etc.
- Seismic geotechnical hazard evaluation and microzoning
- Seismic site effects evaluation and comparison with Eurocode 8 and Italian code spectra
- Back analyses and safety evaluation against soil liquefaction and slope stability during earthquakes
- Seismic design of retaining walls and shallow foundations
- Dynamic soil-structure interaction analysis
- Design of countermeasures against slope stability and soil liquefaction during earthquakes
- Pile testing and design
- Underground structure design
Our relation and partnerships
Our working group has relations with various international research groups in the field of geotechnical and earthquake engineering (International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, ISSMGE, European Association of Earthquake Engineering, EAEE, European Seismological Society, ESS, etc.) and collaborates with many other Italian universities, scientific research institutes of the Italian Research Council (CNR), the Ministry for the University and Scientific and Technological Research (MURST), the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), the “Autorità di Bacino del Fiume Po” (ADBPO), the Italian Geotechnical Association (AGI) and several Italian Administrations (Florence Municipality, Emilia Romagna, Marche, Toscana and Umbria Regions).
Our facilities
- A Geotechnical Laboratory is available to perform laboratory tests under static (direct shear tests, triaxial tests with internal strain measures, oedometric compression tests, unconfined compression tests) and dynamic (resonant column and cyclic torsional shear tests)loading conditions, and field dynamic surveys (down-hole tests).
- In the recent years our staff gained experience in applying some of the most popular codes to solve many geotechnical problems concerning seismic and static slope stability analyses (STABL, FLAC, etc.), 1-D and 2-D soil response analyses (PROSHAKE, QUAD4M, etc.), 3-D dynamic soil-structure interaction analysis (FLUSH, SASSI2000, etc.), seismic soil liquefaction analyses(DESRAMOD, etc.) and many others. Some of these codes have been modified in order to meet the desired requirements (STABL) and some others have been appositely developed in Fortran, Matlab and Excel (i.e. to obtain the Newmark rigid block displacements, the liquefaction potential index, the seismically-induced soil settlements, filtering and correction of seismic signals, processing and interpretation of down-hole measures, etc.). All these software are available on the PC sets of our laboratory.
- Italian and European accelerometric databases are available to select strong motion recordings.
- A geotechnical database of soil stratigraphies, in situ testing profiles (CPT, NSPT, VS, etc.), and soil specimen properties measured in laboratory from several Italian sites that were studied in the recent years can also be viewed.
- A small specialised library can be consulted and contains classic and updated geotechnical textbooks, Proceedings of the most important World and European Conferences, many Ph.D. and master degree dissertations, geotechnical journals, etc.
- Our publications, project reports, supports for students and technicians from the courses for graduated and Ph.D. students, seminaries, etc. are available n line.