Midland Geotechnical Society
NOTICE OF MEETING
The 7th Ordinary Meeting of the 1999/2000 session will be held on
Monday 3 April 2000 at 7p.m. in the HAWORTH BUILDING,
the University of Birmingham B15 2TT.
Subject: Reinforced Soil Design - M40 DBFO
Speaker: John Baple, Hyder Consulting
The recently completed widening of the M40 between junctions 1a and 3 was
part of a large DBFO contract. The original pre-DBFO scheme had planned the
extensive use of traditional bored pile walls to retain widened earthworks. For
the DBFO scheme reinforced soil was adopted to retain the earthworks as an
alternative. This was achieved with the use of Geogrid Reinforced soil slopes
and soil nailing. The retention of the existing vegetation screen was a core
requirement and the retaining measures had to allow for working around and
avoiding disturbance to this vegetation. The presentation will describe the
various geotechnical solutions adopted, analysis, construction methods and
the soil nail testing.
John Baple graduated from the University of Wales in 1974 and joined Howard
Humphreys & Partners. In 1978 he obtained an MSc in Soil Mechanics from
Imperial College. Rejoining Howard Humphreys he worked on the M1/A1 Link
and the A55 Penmaenbach and Pen y Clip tunnel approaches in North Wales.
In 1980 John was the Chief Engineer on the Songea Makambako Road in
Tanzania and later on the Brazaville Kindamba Highway in the Congo.
Joining Freeman Fox & Partners (now Hyder Consulting) in 1987 John was
involved with numerous highway schemes as a Senior Geotechnical Engineer.
Many of these projects involved construction of embankments on soft alluvium
and required various forms of ground treatment (surcharging, stone columns,
jet grouting, etc.) or load transfer platforms. During the motorway widening of
the 1990's John was responsible for the design of one of the first reinforced
soil slopes adopted by the Highways Agency for widening the M4, and more
recently the M40.
Recently John has worked overseas designing stone columns to support silos
in Bahrain and cement stabilisation of volcanic cinders for a telescope in Hawaii.
He is currently involved with the A55 DBFO in North Wales and several road
schemes in Romania.
Members and visitors should aim to arrive between 6 p.m. and 6.15 p.m. and
park their cars in a perimeter car park. Normal refreshments (bread, pate,
cheese and coffee) will be available in the main bar of Staff House before the
meeting. At about 6.45 p.m. members should walk across to the Haworth
Chemistry Building.
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