Kenneth Harry Roscoe

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Kenneth Harry Roscoe ( December 1914 - April 10, 1970 ) was a British civil engineer who dealt with foundation engineering and soil mechanics.

Roscoe went to school in Newcastle-under-Lyme and studied civil engineering at Cambridge University (Emmanuel College) from 1934 . After a short time with a construction company in 1939 he went to France as an officer with the British armed forces. From 1940 he was a prisoner of war and remained so during the remainder of the war. He was involved in several attempts to escape through tunnels, but was captured again and again. This also sparked his interest in soil mechanics. Immediately after returning from captivity in 1945, he married. As a research student for soil mechanics in Cambridge with John Baker , he built an earthwork laboratory there from 1947. In 1948 he became a lecturer and fellow at Emmanuel College. He was dissatisfied with the state of research on the shear resistance of soils and developed his own experimental apparatus (based on the work of Hvorslev ), in particular his SSA (simple shear apparatus). In Cambridge he was also active in the training of reserve officers and the renovation of university buildings. In 1965 he became a reader and in 1968 he was given a full professorship. He died in a car accident.

Roscoe is considered to be the founder of the Critical State Soil Mechanics ., With his students Andrew Noel Schofield and Peter Wroth . This was based on our own experiments and tests with triaxial devices in Alec Skempton's laboratory at Imperial College. Another influence were ideas from the theory of plasticity, conveyed by his first superior in Cambridge, John Baker, a proponent of load-bearing methods in steel construction. The Cam Clay Model for the behavior of clay goes back to Roscoe within the Critical State Theory, modified in 1968 with John Burland to the Modified Cam Clay Model.

In the year of his death he was the 10th Rankine Lecturer (The influence of strains in soil mechanics, Geotechnique, Vol. 20, 1970, pp. 129-170).

literature

  • Obituary by Schofield and Wroth, Geotechnique, Volume 20, 1970, pp. 123-126

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roscoe, AN Schofield, CP Wroth On the yielding of soils , Geotechnique, Volume 8, 1958, pp. 22-52
  2. ↑ The latter wrote a book about it in 1968 Critical State Soil Mechanics
personal data
SURNAME Roscoe, Kenneth Harry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British civil engineer
DATE OF BIRTH December 1914
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 1970