Ralph R. Proctor

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Ralph Roscoe Proctor (born December 16, 1894 in Grayslake , † October 12, 1962 ) was an American civil engineer, known as the inventor of the Proctor experiment .

After two years of studying civil engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles , Proctor was from 1916 at the California water supply authority BWWS (Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply, under William Mulholland and Harvey van Norman), where he spent the rest of his career as An engineer remained, where he was mostly employed on construction sites and thus acquired a great deal of experience in a wide variety of basic construction tasks, especially in dam construction. He was involved in the construction of the St. Francis Dam and in the investigation of its failure. During the construction of the Bouquet Canyon Dam from 1932 to 1934, he developed the Proctor test, named after him, in order to determine the optimal water content (for stability and desired water permeability) for the compacted earth masses used for the dam construction. In doing so, he quantitatively discovered that with a specified compaction energy and dimensions of the soil sample, a maximum dry density was achieved with a certain water content. He published the test in 1933 and it proved very useful, especially in road construction.

He was a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

literature

  • Doyce Nunis, Charles Johnson The St. Francis Dam disaster revisited , Historical Society of Southern California 1995
  • Obituary in Transactions of the ASCE, Volume 128, 1963

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For the Bouquet Reservoir in the Angeles National Forest 15 miles from Palmdale
  2. ↑ The existence of an optimal water content for compaction was already known in soil science from at least 1907: Lyman Briggs, John McLane The moisture equivalent of soils , Bulletin No. 45, 1907, US Bureau of Soils, Washington DC
  3. ↑ The Proctor curve (dry density plotted against water content in percent) has a maximum at a certain water content (the associated density is the Proctor density) and resembles a parabola that is open at the bottom
  4. ^ Proctor Fundamental principles of soil compaction , Engineering News Record, a series of four papers dated August 31, 1933, September 7, 21, and 28
personal data
SURNAME Proctor, Ralph R.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Proctor, Ralph Roscoe (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American civil engineer
DATE OF BIRTH December 16, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Grayslake
DATE OF DEATH October 12, 1962