About the Author

Introductory Geotechnical Engineering is a comprehensive book intended to serve as a textbook for third year engineering students in most degree colleges across the country. This would also help students to tackle most questions in competitive examinations with geotechnical engineering as a subject. It would also help students aspiring for diploma level examinations in civil engineering. The book will also be useful to practising engineers as a ready reference on the subject. Attempts have been made to present the topics in a simplified manner with a large number of solved examples and unsolved problems for exercise. 

First chapter of the book provides a brief introduction on soil mechanics and need for study of the subject. Next eight chapters deal with the theory of soil mechanics dealing with the diverse soil properties. Chapter 10 discusses various types of foundations, where knowledge of soil mechanics will be applied for design and construction. The last chapter introduces the concept of geotechnical earthquake engineering, which is gaining importance as a part of disaster mitigation engineering, and has been introduced as a compulsory subject in civil engineering in many universities.

About the Book

B C Chattopadhyay obtained PhD from IIT Kharagpur for which he won Leonard's Prize from Indian Geotechnical Society. He also received the coveted Jai Krishna Award, the Ministry of Irrigation and Power, Government of India and several other awards from Institution of Engineering (India). Having vast teaching experience for more than four decades at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, Chattopadhyay has been Dean, Research and Consultancy and Director for School of Disater Mitigation Engineering and Head of Civil Engineering Department at Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur (BESUS), formerly known as BE College. He has also been a member of Executive Committee of the Indian Geotechnical Society and Chairman of Geotechnical Study Centre, the West Bengal Chapter of Indian Geotechnical Society, Kolkata (20042008). At present, he is the Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, BESUS.