Alec Skempton

Alec Westley Skempton (born June 4, 1914 in Northampton , † August 9, 2001 in London ) was a British civil engineer who is considered the founder of modern soil mechanics in Great Britain.

Life

Skempton studied at Imperial College London , where he graduated in 1935. His original interests were in geology, but he then turned to civil engineering. After completing his studies in 1936, he went to the Building Research Station as a scientist, where a soil mechanics department had already been set up in 1933 under the direction of Leonard Cooling, which he joined in 1937. In 1947 he became a reader for soil mechanics at Imperial College (where he conducted the first such courses at an English university). He never did a PhD, but received a DSc from the University of London in 1949. In 1955 he became professor of soil mechanics and in 1957, as the successor to Sutton Pippard (who had brought him to Imperial College), head of the Institute of Civil Engineering at Imperial College, which he remained until 1976. In 1981 he retired. Even after that he was scientifically active at Imperial College until a few months before his death.

In 1947 he set up the Soil Mechanics Section for the Institution of Civil Engineers . In this function he was also significantly involved on the British side at the 2nd International Conference of Soil Mechanics and Foundations Engineering in Rotterdam in 1948. The British Geotechnical Association (BGA) later emerged from these beginnings.

Skempton was ennobled in 2000 for his services to soil mechanics and foundation engineering. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1961), an external member of the National Academy of Engineering (1976) and a founding member of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1976 . He has received numerous honors (such as the Terzaghi Prize of the ASCE in 1981, the gold medal of the Institution of Structural Engineers in 1981, the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London, the Dickinson Medal of the Newcomen Society in 1974, the Ewing Gold Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1968) and was second president (after Karl von Terzaghi ) of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering from 1957 to 1961 . He was an honorary doctor of the Universities of Durham , Aston and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

Skempton gave the 4th Rankine Lecture (Long term stability of clay slopes, Geotechnique, Volume 14, 1964, pp. 77-102). At Imperial College in 2004 the Skempton Building was named after him, in which the Faculty of Civil Engineering is located.

He had been married to Nancy Wood since 1940, who died in 1993, and had two daughters. Skempton was an amateur flautist.

plant

In addition to his scientific work, in which he introduced the A, B coefficients in pore water pressure , among other things , he was involved in numerous construction projects in an advisory capacity. In particular, he studied the behavior of the (London) clay, landslides and dam breaks, such as that of the Chingford Dam (William Girling Reservoir for drinking water supply to London) in north-east London at the beginning of his career. The dam failed during construction, according to Skempton's analysis, because it was erected too quickly and the clay layers could not consolidate sufficiently. In 1984 he investigated the broken Carsington Dam. He was also involved in dam projects in India and Pakistan, such as the Mangla Dam from 1958 for the engineering firm Binnie und Partner, with whom he was associated at the time. At Chew Stoke Dam, he used sand pillars for drainage for the first time in Great Britain in order to accelerate soil consolidation. At the beginning of his career he was involved in the construction of the Waterloo Bridge (1938/39). From 1965 to 1967 he advised on the settlement problems of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In 1970/72 he advised on the investigation into the founding of St. Paul's Cathedral in London and in 1982 Salisbury Cathedral. A characteristic of much of Skempton's work is the extensive consideration of geological aspects.

He also wrote papers on the history of soil mechanics and foundation engineering. For example, he dealt with Alexandre Collin , John Smeaton , John Grundy and William Jessop , the geotechnical problems in the Thames tunnel by Marc Isambard Brunel (and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel ), canal and railroad construction in the 19th century, at the port of London and Thomas Telford . At the 7th European Congress of Soil Mechanics in Brighton in 1981 he gave a lecture on Landmarks in early soil mechanics (printed in his Selected Papers). He was editor and one of the main authors of the Biographical Dictionary of civil engineers (Volume 1, 1600-1830) and published a bibliography of writings on the early history of foundation engineering and soil mechanics. In the 1980s he served on the Board of the Historical Engineering Work Committee of the British Civil Engineers Association (ICE).

A work from 1956 with DH Macdonald dealt with the permitted settlement of buildings.

literature

• Chandler, Chrimes, Vaughan, Burland: Obituary, in: Geotechnique, Volume 51, 1988, p. 829
• Judith Niechcial: Particle of Clay. A Biography of Alec Skempton, Civil Engineer , Whittles Publishing, 2002, ISBN 1-870325-84-2 (written by his daughter)
• Skempton: Selected papers on soil mechanics , London, Thomas Telford 1984
• Achim Hettler and Karl-Eugen Kurrer : Earth pressure . Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-433-03274-9 , pp. 343-344

Web links

• Obituary in the Guardian 2001
• Biography at the Skempton / Bishop Archives

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 1977 to 1979 he was its president
2. ↑ 1974 to 1976 he was its vice-president
3. ^ The pore pressure coefficients A and B , Geotechnique, Volume 4, 1954, pp. 143-147
4. ^ William Girling Reservoir . Karl von Terzaghi , among others, examined the dam breach and the investigation of its failure is sometimes seen as the birth of modern soil mechanics in Great Britain.
5. ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer: Skempton, Alec Westley . In: History of structural engineering. In search of balance . 2nd, greatly expanded edition. Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-433-03134-6 , pp. 1035-1036 .
6. ^ Geotechnique, Volume 1, 1949, p. 216
7. ↑ about which he wrote a book in 1981
8. ↑ John Grundy (1719–1783). An English consulting engineer who worked primarily in hydraulic engineering and swamp drainage. The earliest surviving British plan for an earth dam (1766), which he created for the expansion of a dammed lake in the park of the Duke of Anchester, the dam of which he constructed in 1748, comes from him.
9. ↑ on which he wrote a book with C. Hadfield in 1979
10. ↑ civil engineers from Great Britain and Ireland are listed
11. ↑ The allowable settings of buildings , Proc. Inst. Civil Engineers, III, Volume 5, 1956, pp. 727-768