1st International Workshop on Bio-Inspired Geotechnics
This workshop will bring together roughly 60 researchers and students with expertise in soil mechanics, biology, mechanical engineering, robotics, and other fields to foster collaborations and identify emerging research opportunities in the field of bio-inspired geotechnics. Geotechnical engineering and soil mechanics are the fields that deal with civil infrastructure and construction processes built on, in, or within the ground, including excavation processes, mobility in granular media, and foundations for buildings and bridges. Bio-inspiration can lead to development of better geotechnical solutions for society, such as self-motile robots for underground sensor deployment inspired by earthworm, caecilian, and razor clam locomotion. The workshop will be held on May 19 - 22 in Pacific Grove, CA.
The workshop will be highly interactive with group discussions and break-out sessions. The workshop objectives are to:
- explore opportunities and scope for the quickly-evolving field of bioinspired geotechnics,
- identify promising organisms as sources of inspiration,
- establish collaborations across multiple fields, and
- provide an opportunity to all participants to share their current and future research.
Workshop attendees can find resources and workshop documents here.
Please visit the 1st International Workshop on Bio-Inspired Geotechnics website for more information.
The support from NSF award #1821029 is gratefully acknowledged.
High-resolution X-ray CT scans of various sands
The stl files provided below were generated from CT scans performed at a resolution higher than 10 microns. This resolution enables visualization of the overall particle shape as well as the particle surface texture. The library provided here is composed of sand particles commonly tested in soil mechanics laboratories.
Ottawa 20-30 Sand
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Coarse Monterrey Sand
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Angular Concrete Sand
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The support from NSF award #1735732 is gratefully acknowledged.
Quantification of Surface Topography (QuSTo) open-source program
QuSTo, a versatile, open-source program developed in Python to quantify surface topography from 2D profiles. The program calculates metrics that quantify surface roughness and the size (i.e. height and length) and shape (i.e. convexity constant (CC), skewness (Sk), and kurtosis (Ku)) of surface structures. Currently, QuSTo is available as a Windows executable, which neatly packs a python interpreter and the all the computational packages. The accompanying QuSlicer module gives users and optional way to obtain 2D profiles from 3D images. The files created from QuSlicer can then be loaded and analyzed with QuSTo. The program can be downloaded from: https://github.com/GMLatUCDavis/QuSTo. The image below shows an example of the QuSTo interface. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4627805.
