Sea-Tac Runway Nearing Completion
Articles
Side Hill Retaining Walls – Part 1
Side-hill retaining walls refer primarily to fill-walls built partway down the sides of an existing slope or embankment. They are encountered in roadway and rail widening projects as well as site development but usually in steep terrain. This article provides an overview of the problems, failure mechanisms, investigation approaches, analysis tools and wall type alternatives for these structures. Click through to read the article!
Software Updates
ADAMA Software Updates – MSEW and ReSSA
ADAMA Software has released several updates to their popular MSE Wall design software and Reinforced Soil Slope software packages. Update 9 to MSEW 3.0 was posted on April 25. The changes include several updates related to the AASHTO 2007 code, and the option to use either the Simplified Method (AASHTO) or the Coherent Gravity Method (CGM). And there is now an option for considering live load (LL) in calculating Tmax for strength and connection but ignoring it for pullout.
Update 2.2 to ReSSA 3.0 was posted yesterday, May 5 after several itterations of the update were posted during the month of April. The update includes a fix for handling geometries where multiple points have the same X-coordinate but different Y-coordinates. It also allows for the specification of a vertical seismic coefficient as well as a horizontal one. And the latest updates allow the inclusion of the safety map in the printout, include modified calculations of reinforcement quantities, and allow user-selected colors for reinforcement layers that now shows up in the printout too. Click through for the download link.
Conferences
Rensselaer Civil Engineering Students Take First Prize at National GeoChallenge Competition
Here’s a press release from Rensselaer about their students winning the MSE wall competition at the Geo-Frontiers conference. Congratulations guys! [Source: Rensselaer via ASCE SmartBrief. Image: RPI]