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Undergraduate teaching of Unsaturated Soil Mechanics: building on fundamental physical mechanisms to pave the way for geotechnical analyses

(accompanying paper by Alessia Amabile & Alessandro Tarantino)

Unsaturated soil mechanics is typically not included in traditional geotechnical engineering curricula at undergraduate level and the design and development of specific modules is usually left to the initiative of individual academics, very often already involved in unsaturated soil mechanics’ research. Due to the lack of advanced testing equipment for unsaturated soils, even when principles of unsaturated soil mechanics are added to the curriculum, they typically lack the laboratory component usually included in traditional geotechnical engineering courses. The lecture presents an innovative approach to teach unsaturated soil mechanics starting from elementary physical mechanisms. One of the distinctive features of this approach is using real-time, small-scale experiments to provide a visual demonstration of key micromechanisms of unsaturated soil mechanics, such as surface tension and capillary forces. This offers the opportunity to enhance students’ engagement and at the same time help them develop a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of unsaturated soil mechanics by presenting them in a non-axiomatic fashion. The proposed approach also focuses on providing numerical tools that enable students to carry out simple, introductory analyses of unsaturated geostructures. In this approach, content is introduced by building upon concepts and methodologies that are typically familiar to undergraduate students, making it accessible and easy to implement across different universities.