Geotechnical Engineering - Facilities
Geotechnical Laboratories
The Geotechnical Engineering laboratories at the University of Washington has standard soil testing equipment including soil classification, compaction, consolidation, direct shear, permeability, unconfined compression, and stress and strain controlled monotonic triaxial devices. Specialized research equipment include:
- A CKC cyclic triaxial testing device capable of testing 7.1 cm and 15.2 cm diameter samples
- A SBEL (Stokoe) resonant column shear device for obtaining dynamic soil parameters
- A 16.0 ft. by 8.0 ft. earthquake simulator (shaking table) with a modular series of holes for attaching either geotechnical or structural specimens
- A true triaxial device that can handle 19 inches cubic specimens
- A true triaxial device customized for testing partially saturated soils
- A uni-cell device for testing reinforced soil specimens.
- Geosynthetics equipment for routine tests as well as specialized research on the filtration, separation, reinforcement properties of geosynthetics.
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| Oedometer | 9" cubic device | 4" cubic device |
All devices are equipped with computer data acquisition systems. Equipment for extracting field samples is also available. A humidity room is available for storage of field samples.