Special Issue on Modeling in Geotechnical Engineering for Design and Materials

This issue of the International Journal of Geomechanics is designed to accommodate the interests of engineers and researchers in modeling geomaterials and designing geostructures. Developing appropriate models and methods for dealing with design and material issues can be challenging. To address some of this challenge, a total of five technical papers have been carefully selected for this special issue. One of the papers, “Measuring and Modeling Proportion-Dependent Stress-Strain Behavior of EPS-Sand Mixture,” is dedicated to designing lightweight earth materials by mixing expanded polystyrene (EPS) beads with sands and determining the stress-strain behavior of the resulting EPS-sand mixture through triaxial tests and Cam-clay models. Another paper, “Monitoring and Modeling Grout Efficiency of Lifting Structure in Soft Clay,” deals with the modeling of grout behavior in soft clay. Two papers are related to damage and deformation behavior of geopaving materials. Of them, one paper, “Dynamic Numerical Analysis of Antimoisture-Damage Mechanism of Permeable Pavement Base,” provides a dynamic fluid-solid coupling analysis of the saturated pavement base course employing finite-difference approach. The other paper, “Modeling Permanent Deformation of Unbound Granular Materials under Repeated Loads,” presents a new model for describing permanent deformation behavior of unbound materials under repeated loading. Finally, “Stability of Shallow Tunnel Using Rigid Blocks and Finite-Element Upper Bound Solutions” looks at an effective way to model the stability of shallow tunnels using upper-bound solutions in the rigid blocks failure mechanism and in the finite-element method. These papers are taken from the 2009 GeoHunan International Conference. The editors are grateful to the authors, researchers, and reviewers. We express our special thanks to the chief editor of the Journal, Musharraf Zaman, for providing useful feedback and comments during the editorial phase.