The CD contains the papers presented at the Second European Conference on Unsaturated Soils, E-UNSAT 2012, held in Napoli, Italy, in June 2012. The event is the second of a series of European conferences, born on initiative of the researchers involved in the EU FP6 MUSE – Mechanics of Unsaturated Soils for Engineering – Research and Training Network, and follows the first successful one, organised in Durham, UK, in 2008. The conference series was then supported by Technical Committee 106 of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering on Unsaturated Soils, which is very active in promoting new opportunities to bring together researchers and practitioners to share advances in unsaturated soils mechanics and related engineering applications.
A collection of more than one hundred papers is included in these volumes, addressing the three thematic areas experimental, including advances in testing techniques and soil behaviour, modelling, covering theoretical and constitutive issues together with numerical and physical modelling, and engineering, focusing on approaches, case histories and geo-environmental themes. The areas of application of the papers embrace most of the geotechnical problems related to unsaturated soils. Increasing interest in geo-environmental problems, including chemical coupling, marks new perspectives in unsaturated soil mechanics. We hope this book will provide a valuable up-to-date reference across the subject for both researchers and practitioners.
The published contributions, coming from fourteen European countries and another fourteen countries all around the world, were selected after a careful peer-review process. We would like to acknowledge the work done by the reviewers, for their fundamental contribution in assuring the quality of the published papers. We also gratefully acknowledge our colleagues from the Organising and the Technical Advisory Committees and the Authors for the valuable help they provided towards the outcome of the Conference. Special thanks are due to Dr. Marco Caruso, who took charge of the final layout of the publication.
The Conference has been endorsed by the Università di Napoli Federico II, and by the Politecnico di Milano. We thank the Italian Geotechnical Society – AGI –for supporting the initiative in the National and the International community.
It is, with a sort of romantic attitude, that we acknowledge valued contributions from all the continents, which reminds us of the role played by Napoli in joining cultures and peoples during its long lasting history of more than twenty-eight centuries
