November Dinner Meeting - Dr. Richard J. Bathurst, Ph.D., FRSC, FCAE, FEIC, FCSCE

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Dr. Bathurst is Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at the Royal Military College of Canada, with teaching roles at Queen's University and Japan's Port and Airport Research Institute (2016-2026). He is past-president of several engineering societies, including the Engineering Institute of Canada and the International Geosynthetics Society.

Dr. Bathurst has authored or co-authored 227 journal papers and over 300 other scholarly works. His research spans micromechanics of soils, railway dynamics, pavement drainage, soil-geotextile behavior, modeling of reinforced materials, laboratory testing methods, and tsunami prediction. Currently, his focus is on the use of geosynthetic and metallic reinforcement in earth retaining wall systems including environmental impact assessment and sustainability, soil nailing, numerical modeling, seismic performance and design of these systems, probabilistic design of reinforced and unreinforced soil structures, reliability-based design, and load and resistance factor design (LRFD) calibration of soil-structures. 

He has received numerous national and international awards, including the ASCE Geo-Institute Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award (2021), and has contributed to Canadian and American engineering codes. Dr. Bathurst is Editor-in-Chief of Geosynthetics International, incoming Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Geomechanics, and an editorial board member for multiple journals. He was named Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2017) and awarded the Bathurst Reinforcement Lecture (2021) and the EIC Julian C. Smith Medal (2024) for contributions to Canadian engineering.

LECTURE OVERVIEW:

Reliability-based design for internal stability limit states for geosynthetic mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls provides a more nuanced appreciation of the margin of safety for these systems compared to conventional factor of safety, partial factor, and load and resistance factor design (LRFD) approaches. The lecture introduces the basics of probabilistic analysis and design for internal stability limit states for MSE walls using the example of geogrid reinforced soil walls. The general approach uses a closed-form solution for reliability index which is easily implemented in a spreadsheet. The lecture demonstrates how bias statistics for tensile load and pullout model accuracy can be gathered from load measurements recorded from instrumented walls and found in laboratory pullout box test databases. The lecture concludes with example calculations of the probabilistic margin of safety for tensile strength and pullout limit states using the AASHTO Simplified Method and the recent AASHTO Stiffness Method in the USA.

EVENT DETAILS

Check-in and social hour begins at 5:00 with food and drinks available (included with your ticket). Food will start between 5:00 and 5:30, and the presentation will begin at 6:15. We look forward to an evening of insightful discussion, professional networking, and continuing education.