The British Geotechnical Association (BGA) is the principal association for geotechnical engineers in the UK.
Past event: Please note this event information is displayed for informational purposes only.
This event will be going ahead as planned on 15 March 2023 despite potential travel disruption in London due to strike action. It is recommended that you plan your journey in advance and make travel provisions where necessary.
This will be held as an in-person event and will also be webcast live.
If you plan to attend the Lecture in person, please note:
You are asked:
If you plan to watch the lecture online:
The Lecture will be streamed live via YouTube using this LINK
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with the live feed, please email Truong Le (truong.le@imperial.ac.uk) with details of
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Thank you for your co-operation and enjoy the event.
The Rankine Lecture is widely viewed as the most prestigious of the invited lectures in geotechnics. It commemorates William John Macquorn Rankine, Professor of Civil Engineering at Glasgow University, who was one of the first engineers in the UK to make a significant contribution to soil mechanics. He is best known for his theory for the earth pressure on retaining walls.
The Rankine Dinner will be held after the lecture. The call for tickets for the dinner is HERE. Please note the dinner is usually heavily oversubscribed.
Earlier in the day a Pre-Rankine Seminar 'Recent large-scale field research into offshore foundation behaviour' will be held in the Skempton Building at Imperial College London. Full details of the seminar can be found HERE.
The British Geotechnical Association
15.03.2023
17:30 - 19:30
The Great Hall, Sherfield Building, Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, SW7 2AZ
BGA Meetings
Tea, coffee and biscuits will be served between 4:00-5:15 pm
Lecture theatre doors open at 4:45 pm
Constitutive models are an essential part of computational modelling in geotechnics; they are at the heart of almost all theoretical predictions of geotechnical structures. How the stress-strain (and perhaps time) response of soil (and rock) is represented in these mathematical models is usually the key to successful prediction of the behaviour of geotechnical structures. However, the important details of these models, particularly the idealisations that are made, may be poorly or incompletely understood, or ignored, sometimes at significant cost to the unwary analyst. Indeed, the capabilities and the shortcomings of these models, especially the more advanced models, are not always easy to ascertain. In some cases, determination of the values of the input parameters is not straightforward. Consequently, it may be difficult to determine which model to select for a particular task. This lecture will explore some of the more important developments in the constitutive modelling of soils and will attempt to address some of these issues of potential concern. The need for such models and the various attributes and capabilities that the commonly used models possess will be reviewed. Also discussed is the issue of matching a particular model to the geotechnical problem at hand, which model attributes are required and why. The intention is to place emphasis in this lecture on the physical basis of these models, rather than explore their mathematical complexity in detail. Some of the constitutive models encoded in the software packages used routinely in geotechnical practice are reviewed, and discussion is also provided on their specific limitations. Examples of practical applications, involving the solution of boundary and initial value problems, are described to illustrate both the advantages and some of the limitations of both commonly used and highly advanced constitutive models.
the University of Newcastle, Australia
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 MembersWidely viewed as the most prestigious of the invited lectures in geotechnics and was first held in 1961.
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