Synopsis of Lecture

Engineering in the ground is fascinating, very challenging, and it involves a huge array of skills and disciplines.  In my career, it seems that three topics, in particular, have repeatedly come to the forefront: understanding and predicting deformation, designing safely when water pressure is dominant, and, more generally, trying to manage the many uncertainties we face in a rational manner that can be agreed and communicated to others.

Engineers are concerned with the “built environment”, and building is certainly our business, but the environment in which geotechnical engineers work is usually not built by humans – it is the product of nature, or sometimes it is the remnant left from historic human activity.  The ground is intriguing, frustrating and unruly.  It holds many secrets and does not submit readily to our rules.

So maybe its secrets could be regarded as its own secret code.  It is often said that geotechnical engineering is a mysterious art, implying that participants communicate with each other in a suspicious code which cannot be penetrated by the rational mind.  But if we are to work with the ground in a rational and systematic way, we need to have a different type of code to guide our behaviour – a code of practice.  And in studying the ground and trying to predict its behaviour we probably need computer codes.  All of these codes will feature in this lecture.


C.V. of the Speaker

Brian Simpson is an Arup Fellow, a principal of Arup Geotechnics and an Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham, UK.  He has worked on a wide range of geotechnical and ground-structure interaction problems, including foundations, excavations, retaining structures and tunnels.  His PhD studies at the University of Cambridge were in the early development of finite element modelling of geotechnical materials and design problems, a topic in which he has remained active throughout his career.  He has led the geotechnical design and analysis of a number of large basement projects in London, starting with the British Library for which innovating approaches to modelling and safety formats were developed.  More recently he has advised on the design and analysis of major infrastructure developments in and around London, including the Jubilee Line, Channel Tunnel Rail Link, redevelopment of Kings Cross and CrossRail.  He has been an expert witness on major disputes and investigations of collapse in the UK, Singapore and New Zealand.  He presented the BGA Rankine Lecture in 1992 and a State-of-the-Art report on Geotechnical Analysis and Design at the 2009 international conference of ISSMGE.

Since the early 1980’s, he has been involved in the development of Eurocode 7 (Geotechnical Design), having been a member of its drafting panels and vice-chairman of the CEN (Comité Européen de Normalisation) committee on Eurocode 7 (SC7).  He has authored two commentaries on Eurocode 7 and several papers on various related issues.  He is the current chair of ISSMGE Technical Committee TC205 on Safety and Serviceability in Geotechnical Engineering and of the BSI committee on geotechnical codes, B/526.  He is often the UK delegate to SC7 and is a member of several of the “Evolution Groups” set up to propose further developments of Eurocode 7.