40 Years of Full-scale Infrastructure Testing at a National Geotechnical Experimentation Site: Clay Site

Abstract

A site at the Texas A&M University RELLIS campus was dedicated to full-scale infrastructure testing in 1978. It was designated as a National Geotechnical Experimentation Site by NSF and FHWA in 1992. The site is made of 12 m of stiff to very stiff clay, within which most experiments took place, and an underlying deep layer of clay shale. The water table is approximately 6 m deep. Over the last 40 years, many full-scale instrumented experiments on infrastructure elements have been conducted at that site. The main projects include grouted anchors, drilled shafts with and without intentional defects, post-grouted drilled shafts, drilled and grouted piles, geothermal piles, soil nails, a pickup truck crashing into a pole founded on a single pile, as well as various mechanical and erosion in-situ tests. Each one of those projects is described and the results and lessons learned from these full-scale infrastructure tests and associated soil tests are reported in this paper; reference to related reports is made for more details on each project.