Granular Materials in Civil Engineering: Recent Advances in the Physics of Their Mechanical Behavior and Applications to Engineering Works - Multiscale Geomechanics: From Soil to Engineering Projects - page 34

Chapter 3
Granular Materials in Civil Engineering:
Recent Advances in the Physics of Their
Mechanical Behavior and Applications
to Engineering Works
Construction of large civil engineering infrastructures commonly involves large
volumes of earthfill and rockfill, sometimes up to tens of millions of cubic meters,
as in highways or railway platforms, marine infrastructures or large rockfill dams,
see Figure 3.1. Examples of these include the Grand-Maison Dam in France (height
160 m, volume 1,400 m 3 materials) with a compacted central clay core, or the
Campos Novos dam in Brazil (height 202 m, volume 1,300 m 3 ) with a watertight
concrete slab on the upstream face, which will be discussed later on in the text.
For this last type of dam, which has become dominant in dam construction today,
a major portion of the design methods has been based on the empirical extrapolation
of the standard methods used (in the past) for lower dams. This empirical approach,
based on North American expertise, has recently led to serious technical accidents
during commissioning on very high dams. As a consequence, concern in the
profession has arisen, leading to a return to more rational approaches in design, and
particularly engineering approaches, through structural analysis and relevant
material testing. This should be the case for any large civil engineering structure and
highlights the need to improve our knowledge about the behavior of the coarse
granular materials constituting these works, as well as the behavior of these large
structures. This improvement can be done by integrating the local physical