Ting-Wei Wu

Thanks to SLATE that provided financial support to make this stay possible, I could have a very nice working and learning experience in the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) in May and June, 2019. In its world-famous geotechnical laboratory, I continued doing my seismic strengthening study on Ottawa Sand with an advanced triaxial apparatus.

I would like to thank Carl Harbitz for introducing me into the NGI community where I not only enjoyed work but also got the chance to join many activities. NGI has a very active and vigorous working environment and I received a lot of support from numerous people, in particular from Yusuke Suzuki who assisted me in changing the load cell and the top cap, demonstrated how to measure the shear modulus using bender elements, and created an adaptive control function to estimate the specimen’s stiffness during dynamic loadings to improve data quality. I am very grateful to his great expertise and supervision which made my stay successful. Helge Rolandsgard kindly showed me for the first time how to prepare a sample with NGI’s moist tamping technique, which was very impressively precise in controlling the height of the reconstituted specimen. I would also like to thank Thomas Vestgården who helped me with the determination of minimum and maximum dry unit weights of my Ottawa Sand samples using NGI’s in-house dry deposition and vibration methods.

I conducted 26 triaxial tests in these two months and gave two presentations in June. I really appreciated the presence of many attendees who gave me knowledge input and suggestions to improve the testing procedure, especially from Amir Kaynia and Brian Carlton. In the geotechnical laboratory, I received a lot of advice from numerous experts, and also got the chance to learn from people who did different kinds of tests. As I was not an engineering student before, it was very interesting to know the perspectives from those hard-core civil engineers.

To conclude, it was a very nice visit for me to spend two months in NGI. Last but not least, I would like to thank Morten Sjursen for providing the lab facilities to use. I conducted this two-months work at the Schmertmann Research Laboratory (SRL) in NGI with advanced equipment to focus on research-oriented projects. In return to my free-use of the facilities and the training and advising I received, it will be my pleasure to wrap up the results and make a publication in the near future to gain visualization of this work and this laboratory to the scientific society.