Nick O'Riordan

Nick O'Riordan (* 1953 ) is a British civil engineer specializing in geotechnical engineering . He holds a PhD in Geoengineering at Arup , Arup Fellow, Director at Arup and was Head of Global Geotechnical Engineering there from 2009 to 2017. He had been with Arup since 1977, where he set up the geotechnical risk assessment . He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Southampton and is an Industrial Fellow at the University of Bristol . In 2018 he gave the Rankine Lecture as the first engineer from the construction industry since the Rankine Lecture for Brian Simpson 25 years earlier.

O'Riordan received his bachelor's degrees in civil engineering from Robert Gibson and Kevin Nash at King's College London in 1977 before joining Arup that year. Also in 1977 he received his doctorate in soil mechanics from King's College (dissertation: Consolidation and settlement characteristics of interbedded alluvial deposits ). His first assignment at Arup was modeling London clay with Brian Simpson and testing deep pile foundations at the British Library.

He published, among other things, about offshore geotechnics (Ravenspurn platform in the 1980s) and dams on soft clay subsoil, pile foundations in very stiff clays, earthquake risks for buildings, he was responsible for the geotechnics in the High Speed ​​One railway project (Channel Tunnel Rail Link) and from 2015 for the new international airport of Mexico City (on very soft sea clay and with a high earthquake hazard). He also worked a lot in California and especially San Francisco , where he was in the Arup branch from 2009 to 2012 (foundation of the 326 m high Salesforce Tower and the 181 Fremont Street Tower, Port of Long Beach, pile foundations with cement grouting at the top for the Gerald Desmond Bridge, the underground of the Transbay Transit Center ) as well as in Italy (he speaks fluent Italian), where he opened Arup's Rome office in 2007. For example, he was the responsible geotechnical engineer for the construction of road tunnels in the center of Naples . He was a court expert in the USA and England for geotechnical engineering (tunnel collapses, among other things) and soil contamination and prepared energy and carbon dioxide balances early on in some of his projects.

His projects include the stabilization of the abandoned salt mines below Northwich in Chester, the foundation of the television tower in Barcelona (Torre de Colleserola), the high-speed railway station in Florence (at a depth of 25 m), the foundation of the Shannon Bridge in Athlone and the Liffey Bridge in Dublin , the reclamation of the 60 hectare site of the former Chatham shipyard (Regeneration St. Mary's Island), the foundation of the Reuters building and the establishment of the Sainsbury wing of the extension of the National Gallery in London (1980s), including a deep excavation pit right next to the settlement-sensitive structure of the existing National Gallery. He also directed slab testing (for bullet train) at Kidsgrove . In the 1980s he was also involved in the investigation of the collapse of limestone mines in the West Midlands and in the design of the foundation of a never-built 400m high skyscraper in the La Defense district of Paris.

In 2018 he gave the Rankine Lecture ( Dynamic soil-structure interaction - Understanding the Holocene, instrumenting the Anthropocene ). He is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers .

Web links

• Arup website
• Rankine Lecture by O'Riordan
• Michaila Hancock: Rankine interview: Outside the lines , March 2018, plus