Soil stress, settlement & ground failure — how soil carries load, consolidates, seeps, compacts and fails.
A point-load platen stands above an elastic soil cutaway. Colored sample stations and contours show vertical stress spreading with depth; move a probe radially and downward to compare the centerline with off-axis stress.
A strip footing pushes into a soil cutaway as gross contact pressure ramps upward. Resistance terms are separated into cohesion, embedment surcharge and soil-weight contributions. An illustrative shear mechanism appears when demand exceeds idealized ultimate pressure.
An oedometer-style clay specimen sits between porous drainage boundaries under a sustained stress increment. Pore-pressure bars shrink, water leaves through selected drains and the platen settles as effective stress increases.
A slope cutaway shows a block above a plane parallel to the ground surface. Normal stress, pore pressure and downslope demand define the infinite-slope factor of safety. When FS falls below one, a capped rigid-block motion illustrates the loss of equilibrium.
A slender pile cutaway exposes soil-contact bands along the shaft and an end-bearing bulb. Under an increasing head load, common settlement mobilizes shaft and toe resistance; arrows and an axial-force diagram show where load leaves the pile.
A shaking-table specimen exposes sand grains, water, a pore-pressure sensor and a surface structure. Cyclic excitation generates an illustrative excess-pressure ratio; after shaking stops, drainage reduces it and effective stress recovers.
A vibratory roller traverses a loose fill lift. Grain spacing and lift thickness respond to the calculated dry density; moisture controls the achievable density, and live readouts compare the result with a selected percentage of laboratory maximum.
A constant-head permeability cell connects two water reservoirs through a saturated soil specimen. Head stations show a linear hydraulic gradient, while tracers illustrate Darcy discharge versus mean pore-water speed.
A cutaway excavation deepens between retaining walls. Soil and groundwater pressure arrows increase with depth; upper and lower struts install at selected stage fractions. Compare tributary strut demand, capacity and a labeled wall-deflection proxy.
A sieve stack separates gravel, sand and fines beside a liquid-limit cup, plastic-limit rolling plate and sample scale. The decision sequence combines fines fraction, coarse-fraction composition, gradation coefficients and inorganic plasticity.