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Laing O'Rourke Centre for Construction Engineering and Technology

 

We are pleased to announce that Dr Brian Sheil, Laing O’Rourke Associate Professor in Construction Engineering, has won the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) prestigious Crampton Prize for his paper ‘Monitoring the construction of a large-diameter caisson in sand’, co-authored with industry partner Ward and Burke.

The Crampton Prize is awarded annually to papers of exceptional quality and benefit to civil engineering, construction and materials science. This year, the award ceremony will be held in October at the Institution of Civil Engineers, in London.

The paper appeared in ICE Journal Geotechnical Engineering (Volume 175 Issue 3) in June 2022 and described the instrumentation and monitoring of a large-diameter caisson on a UK construction site. The caisson was instrumented to measure settlement and tilt, soil–structure interaction contact stresses and structural performance. The monitored data revealed the occurrence of complex soil–structure interactions during sinking that are not readily captured by existing prescriptive design approaches. This case history provides valuable information for developing an improved basis for design and an important frame of reference for future monitoring projects.

The paper will be made free-to-all to read on the ICE Virtual Library as part of the organisation’s commitment to furthering knowledge and best practice in civil engineering.

Photo caption: The paper authors' team at the bottom of one of the shafts during the project.

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

 

 

 

 

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