Mikael Juul Hvorslev

Mikael Juul Hvorslev (born December 25, 1895 in Allinggaard, Svostrup , Denmark ; † December 7, 1989 ) was a Danish pioneer in soil mechanics .

Hvorslev made in 1913 in Viborg his High School and studied civil engineering at the Technical University of Denmark , where he graduated in 1918. He then worked as an engineer in the construction of reinforced concrete and industrial buildings in France and Denmark. From 1921 to 1932 he was involved in the construction of hydropower plants and dams in the USA and Colombia . He then went back to university and studied geotechnics at the University of Vienna under Karl von Terzaghi , where he received his doctorate in 1936 ( on the strength properties of disturbed cohesive soils ). In his dissertation, he developed his own ring shear device , which made it possible to obtain reproducible results when investigating the shear strength of soils. He reported on it at the first International Congress for Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering in Harvard in 1937. From 1938 to 1946 he worked in the soil mechanics laboratory of Terzaghi and Arthur Casagrande at Harvard University and then from 1946 as a scientist and later a consultant at the Waterways Experimental Station (WES) of the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi , where he was involved in many geotechnical projects from Panama to Greenland. He officially retired in 1965, but continued to advise until 1976.

At the WES, he researched, among other things, the taking of undisturbed soil samples ( Subsurface explorations and sampling of soils for civil engineering purposes , WES 1948).

In 1946 he was offered the chair of port and foundation engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, but he declined. He was a member of the Danish Academy of Engineering Sciences and an honorary member of the Danish Geotechnical Society. In 1969 he received the US Army Research Award. In 1957 he received the ASCE Walter L. Huber Research Award, of which he became an honorary member in 1979. In 1965 he received the Terzaghi Prize.

literature

• Obituary by Lundgren, Krebs Ovesen, Geotechnique, Volume 40, 1990, p. 677

Individual evidence

1. ↑ History of the WES with biography of Hvorslev ( Memento of the original from August 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.