A Primer on Theoretical Soil Mechanics

Dimitrios Kolymbas is Emeritus Professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, where he worked from 1994 to 2017 as Professor at the Unit of Geotechnical Engineering and Tunnel Engineering. He is the author of several books and more than 100 papers, and invented the new constitutive theories of hypoplasticity and barodesy.

• Preface. 1. Granular materials as soft solids; 2. Mechanical behaviour of soil – experimental results; 3. Mechanical behaviour of soil – intuitively; 4. Vectors and tensors; 5. Fields; 6. Deformation; 7. Stress; 8. Conservation laws (balance equations); 9. Internal friction and shear strength; 10. Collapse; 11. Constitutive equations; 12. Elasticity; 13. Elastic waves; 14. Plasticity theory; 15. Hypoplasticity; 16. Barodesy; 17. Uniqueness; 18. Symmetry; 19. Interaction with water; 20. Computing in soil mechanics; 21. Outlook. References. Index.

'The last several decades have seen a surge of papers on the constitutive modelling of soils, the vast majority of them based on complex and often obscure plasticity concepts. Scientists not specializing in the field lost track and got largely confused. The present book by one of the most prominent scholars in the field succeeds in structuring both the fundamentals and the essential knowledge gained hitherto in a very appealing concise form … The underlying principles are easy to follow and the resulting equations astonishingly short. Predictions of the soil response reproduce all essential features observed in experiments. Besides theory, the text contains justified criticism on current issues in civil engineering. The book is a pleasure to read, and will hopefully become, especially for young scientists, a guide to navigate through the complex field of soil mechanics.' Christos Vrettos, Technical University of Kaiserslautern