History
In an attempt to advance soil testing techniques, Kenneth Harry Roscoe of Cambridge University, in the late forties and early fifties, developed a simple shear apparatus in which his successive students attempted to study the changes in conditions in the shear zone both in sand and in clay soils. In 1958 a study of the yielding of soil based on some Cambridge data of the simple shear apparatus tests, and on much more extensive data of triaxial tests at Imperial College London from research led by Professor Sir Alec Skempton at the Imperial Geotechnical Laboratories, led to the publication of the critical state concept (Roscoe, Schofield & Wroth 1958).
Roscoe obtained his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and his experiences trying to create tunnels to escape when held as a prisoner of war by the Nazis during WWII introduced him to soil mechanics. Subsequent to this 1958 paper, concepts of plasticity were introduced by Schofield and publa classic text book (Schofield & Wroth 1968). Schofield was taught at Cambridge by Prof. John Baker, a structural engineer who was a strong believer in designing structures that would fail "plastically". Prof. Baker's theories strongly influenced Schofield's thinking on soil shear. Prof. Baker's views were developed from his pre-war work on steel structures and further informed by his wartime experiences assessing blast-damaged structures and with the design of the "Morrison Shelter", an air-raid shelter which could be located indoors (Schofield 2006).
Read more about this topic: Critical State Soil Mechanics
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