Nearly every geotechnical engineer has referred to the venerable 1986 NAVFAC DM 7.1 Manual on Soil Mechanics. There are numerous useful charts, correlations, tables, and equations for a variety of geotechnical challenges, which is probably why it’s been so popular! But it’s been scanned and OCR’d to death over the years, and the actual manual was definitely showing its age.
The Geo-Institute of ASCE just hosted a live webinar with a “mini-panel” consisting of Joe Woliver, Geotechnical Branch Manager at NAVFAC, and Dan VandenBerge of Tennessee Tech University to talk about updates made in a new 2022 version! You can download the NAVFAC DM 7.1 Soil Mechanics manual, now under the reference UFC 3-220-10, for free from the US Whole Building Design Guide website. It includes updated, clean figures, updated references, and new information reflecting changes in practice, but all with an eye towards preserving the history and usefulness of the original document we all have grown accustomed to using. The webinar can be watched below! And if you’re curious about updates to NAVFAC DM 7.2 on Foundations and Earth Structures, the panelists expect that updated manual in the Spring of 2023.
