40 Years of Full-Scale Infrastructure Testing at a National Geotechnical Experimentation Site: Sand Site

Abstract

A site at the Texas A&M University RELLIS campus near College Station, Texas, 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 15 m of medium dense silty sand, within which most experiments took place, underlain by a deep layer of clay shale. The water table is approximately 7.5 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 a box culvert within an embankment, spread footings of various sizes, drilled shafts with intentional construction defects, an anchored top down retaining wall, a top down deep-soil-mixing retaining wall, post grouted drilled shafts, vibro-driven steel piles, a drilled shaft embedded in an MSE wall and pushing on it, a tractor trailer truck crashing against a barrier on top of an MSE wall, a single unit truck crashing against a row of in line piles, and erosion in-situ tests. This paper describes each one of those projects and also presents the results and lessons learned from these full-scale infrastructure tests and associated soil tests; references to related reports are provided for further details regarding each project.