Victor de Mello

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Victor Froilano Bachmann de Mello , also cited VFB de Mello (born May 14, 1926 in Goa , † January 1, 2009 in São Paulo ), was a leading Brazilian civil engineer for geotechnical engineering .

Life

De Mello was born the son of a Portuguese professor of medicine and a German-Swiss mother in Goa, India, and attended English school there. From 1944 he studied civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , made his bachelor's and master's degrees in 1946 (with a thesis on the measurement of the shear resistance of clay) and received his doctorate in 1948 under Donald Wood Taylor . Since he had a Portuguese cultural background due to his origin from Goa, he emigrated to Brazil in 1949. Here he initially worked on hydropower projects for an electricity company in São Paulo and from 1951 for the engineering company Geotecnica. Soon after, however, he was working independently as a consulting engineer with his own engineering office in São Paulo. In 1966/67 he was a visiting professor at MIT and later a part-time professor of soil mechanics at the University of São Paulo. He was involved in numerous large dam projects (in Brazil and also worldwide, for example in Africa and China), in foundations for large industrial plants, airports, ports, tunnels, road and rail connections, offshore foundations, but also deep inner-city excavations, high-rise buildings as well large open pit mining projects in Brazil.

In 1977 he was a Rankine Lecturer (Reflections on design decisions of practical significance to embankment dams, Geotechnique, Volume 27, pp. 279-355). As a scientist he was interested in questions of the statistical failure probability of foundation structures, landslides and the stability analysis of dams.

In 1950 he was one of the founders of the Brazilian Geotechnical Society (ABMS), of which he was president from 1964 to 1966 and of which he received the Terzaghi Prize twice (1966, 1978). He was also a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, the Brazilian, Portuguese and Argentine engineering academies, the Third World Academy of Sciences and the Argentine Academy of the sciences. 1970 to 1974 he was Vice President of the International Society of Rock Mechanics (ISRM). From 1973 to 1977 he was Vice President and 1981 to 1985 President of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering (ISSMFE). In 1985 he gave the second Manuel Rocha lecture in Portugal and in 2000 the fourth Pacheca da Silva lecture in Brazil.

In 2009, the Brazilian and Portuguese Geotechnical Societies launched the Victor de Mello Lecture, first given by John Burland .

He was married with a daughter and a son. Most recently he suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ At the 2nd International Conference on Applications of Statistics and Probability, ICASP, Aachen 1975, Vol. 3, pp. 85-138, he gave a lecture on The Philosophy of Statistics and Probability applied to Soil Engineering
personal data
SURNAME Mello, Victor de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mello, Victor Froilano Bachmann de (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Brazilian civil engineer specializing in geotechnical engineering
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Goa
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 2009
Place of death São Paulo