Dr. King-St-Onge, Robert

The effect of rock weathering on geotechnical parameters can become substantial in geotechnical design. The weathering degree (WD) has usually been divided into five levels from fresh rock to completely weathered rock. In this study, the above five WDs are adopted to analyse the variation of several regularly used geotechnical properties. To that aim, a series of laboratory tests on a Chilean granitic rock in different stages of weathering was carried out. The results of the tests have been analysed by normalizing each geotechnical parameter with respect to the value obtained for slightly weathered samples instead of for fresh rock samples as is usually adopted. In this way, it was found that the unconfined compressive strength reduces steadily and considerably with each WD, as has been previously reported. Conversely, the modulus of deformation and P-wave velocity tend to stabilize the rate of reduction for highly and completely weathered rock samples, which does not agree with the trend and higher rate reductions found by other researchers. This stabilization reduction rate with WD was also found for compaction density, friction angle and Poisson's ratio.

Granitic residual soils are soils formed by the in situ weathering of intrusive granitic rocks and are present in different parts of the world. Due to their large presence, many civil engineering projects are carried out on and within these soils. Therefore, a correct characterization of the slopes is necessary for slope stability studies. This investigation aims to study the influence of the values of geomechanical parameters (specific weight, cohesion, and friction angle) and the geometry of a slope (height and inclination) on slope stability of residual granitic soils in dry and static conditions. To this end, an automatic system was developed for the numerical study of cases using the finite element method with limit analysis. The system allows modeling, through Monte Carlo simulation and different slope configurations. With this system, the safety factors of 5000 cases were obtained. The results of the models were processed through the SAFE toolbox, performing a Regional Sensitivity Analysis (RSA). The results of this research concluded that the order of influence of the factors were: slope angle > slope height > cohesion > friction angle > unit weight (β > H > c > ϕ > γ).

One of the most time-consuming activities in higher education is reviewing and grading student evaluations. Rapid and effective feedback of evaluations, along with an appropriate assessment strategy, can significantly improve students’ performance. Furthermore, academic dishonesty is a major issue in higher education that has been aggravated by the limitations derived from the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the possible ways to mitigate this issue is to give different evaluations to each student, with the negative cost of increasing reviewing time. In this work, an open-source system developed in Python to automatically create and correct evaluations is presented. Using Jupyter Notebook as the graphical user interface, the system allows the creation of individual student question sheets, with the same structure and different parameter values, to send them to students, grade them, and send the final score back to the students. The proposed system requires little programming knowledge for the instructors to use it. The system was applied in Civil Engineering and Geological Engineering programs at the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, drastically reducing grading time while improving students’ performance.