SBIR-STTR Award

Theory of fractals will be used to describe soil structures and to describe alterations in soil structure during deformation. The work product will consist of computer based mathematical models for describingsoil microstructure, mathematical expressions for expressing soil particle interaction forces in a manner compatible with fractal theory, and recommendations for imaging and image analysis techniques for obtaining laboratory data on soil samples.

The proposed research will develop fractal principles to describe soil microstructure and will quantify soil strength and compressibility in terms of fractal mathematics. This represents a new and important engineering application of a promising analytical procedure. The method to be developed in this research should result in a sounder analytical approach to predicting soil behavior. Predicting soil strength is a necessary step in the design of most if not all civil engineering operations in both the military and non-military sectors, thus the potential applicability of the proposed research is quite broad. Phase II work will expand on the successful accomplishments of Phase I: (1) by writing computer codes to quantitatively introduce fractal analysis approaches into constitutive relationships for soils, (2) by analyzing images of soil microstructure to determine the fractal properties required to apply the computer codes to real soils, and (3) by using the objective I computer programs to model the real soil behavior observed under objective II.