June 22 - 25, 2025
Delta Hotel and Conference Centre
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Short Courses
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PanAm UNSAT 2025 is planning short courses to be held on the Sunday before the conference starts.
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Lunch is included in all full day (8-hour) courses.
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Short courses are open to those not attending the conference.
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The price for full day courses is $450 per participant and $250 for students.
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Student participants must provide a valid student ID.
SC1: Critical issues for the geoenvironmental and geotechnical management of mine wastes under unsaturated conditions
Instructors:
Michel Aubertin (Polytechnique Montreal)
Paul Simms (Carleton University)
Nicholas Beier (University of Alberta)
Ward Wilson (University of Alberta)
Description
The safe disposal of tailings and waste rock on mine sites requires a good understanding of their geotechnical and environmental behavior under various exposure conditions. In most instances, waste rock stored in piles on the surface are unsaturated, while tailings disposed hydraulically in impoundment often tend to desaturate after their deposition. Closure and reclamation of such disposal sites also involve natural exchange processes with the atmosphere, which affect how soil covers and other engineering works behave. Hence the unsaturated response of mine wastes and selected soils becomes an essential feature for the analysis and design of disposal facilities to ensure their physical and chemical stability. The short course (workshop) will present an overview of various tools and techniques developed for the characterization of unsaturated tailings and waste rock, and methods to assess their geotechnical, hydrogeological and geochemical response under a variety of loading and environmental conditions. The presentation will include examples of unsaturated mine wastes disposal facilities.
SC2: Simple methods to characterize and model unsaturated soil behavior
Instructors:
Xiong Zhang (Missouri University of Science and Technology)
Laureano R. Hoyos (University of Texas at Arlington)
Marcelo Sánchez (Texas A&M University)
Description
Although significant progress has been made in the past six decades, unsaturated soil mechanics is not extensively applied in routine geotechnical engineering practice for several reasons: (1) the equipment suitable to characterize unsaturated soils is highly expensive ($60k-$150k); (2) the required suction-controlled tests are very time-consuming (1-3 months/soil, 3-5 years/soil); and (3) the theoretical frameworks are rather complex and difficult to model. The present full-day workshop focuses on simple methods to characterize and model unsaturated soil behavior, including the following topics: (1) Use of a Modified State Surface Approach (MSSA) to explain unsaturated soil behavior, which can be easily understood by engineers without previous background in constitutive modeling. (2) Use of conventional equipment for “saturated” soils (i.e., oedometer, triaxial, unconfined compression) to rapidly characterize “unsaturated” soil behavior (4-8 hours/test, 1-2 weeks/soil). (3) Step-by-step procedures to analyze these results for constitutive modeling purposes, without sacrificing the theoretical accuracy. (4) Practical examples illustrating the use of these results for numerical simulation of unsaturated soil-related, boundary-value problems in geotechnical engineering via the Barcelona Basic Model (BBM) framework.