The British Geotechnical Association (BGA) is the principal association for geotechnical engineers in the UK.
This event is planned as an in-person event, and will also be webcast live.
Advance registration is required for both in-person attendance and on-line viewing. Use the booking link below.
Photographs may be taken at the event and used for BGA promotional purposes; if you have any objections please contact the BGA via email.
The Géotechnique lecture is a biennial lecture nominated by the Editorial Panel of the journal Géotechnique.
A list of previous lectures in the series can be found HERE.
Event sponsorship opportunities available – Showcase your brand to a targeted audience of industry professionals. To learn more, please email Kate Beardsley, kate.beardsley@ice.org.uk
The British Geotechnical Association
04.11.2025
1830 - 2030
Institution of Civil Engineers, One Great George Street, London SW1P 3AA
This event is free to attend. Advance booking is required for this event.
BGA Meetings
Refreshments will be available from 30 minutes before the start of the lecture.
After the lecture networking will continue at a reception with finger food and alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages available.
Our current understanding of clay behaviour is mostly phenomenological, and this determines and perhaps limits how we can design geotechnical structures in clays. Characterising soil at the microscale allows us to move away from phenomenological approaches towards more physics-based models. Significant advances have been made in modelling granular soils as discrete elements, in which the soils are represented by grain assemblies, now with more realistically-shaped particles and improved contact models. Using the same approach on clays is more difficult, their particles being much smaller and not so easily identified, while attractive-repulsive surface forces govern their behaviour. While a significant amount of work, often pioneering, has been published linking the micro- to macro-behaviour of clays along compression paths, the current research effort is to model clays as clay grain assemblies using the discrete element or molecular dynamics methods. In a quite different light this lecture will show how the behaviour observed at the macroscale in compression and shearing may be simply linked to clay pore properties measured at the microscale. This not only provides insights into the critical state-type of behaviour we are familiar with but also can improve significantly our understanding of clay behaviour while inspiring new directions to model them.
The British Geotechnical Association is grateful for the support of Corporate Members, and the organisations that the BGA Executive Committee members belong to.
View our Corporate Members