Claire Lakin, Civil Engineering Student Research Assistant

Author: Claire Lakin | Majors: Civil Engineering and German

My name is Claire Lakin, and I am a current senior majoring in Civil Engineering and German. Throughout the summer 2021 grant period, I performed research within the civil engineering department under my advisor, Dr. Richard Coffman. The research I performed had an emphasis in the geotechnical engineering field – the field within which I plan to work after I graduate. Within this specific field, I hope to perform subsurface investigations to provide pre-construction engineering design recommendations.

During the spring semester of 2021, I took Dr. Coffman’s soil mechanics class and found myself fully intrigued almost immediately. Not too long into the semester, my interest in the course material had become apparent, and I began doing research for Dr. Coffman. The overall goal of the research we are performing is the improvement of a device that was previously developed by Dr. Coffman and a former student to determine the shearing behavior of soil during triaxial testing. Specifically, the device will be modified to allow for the examination of more points on the surface of soil as it undergoes such testing. The additional points on the soil surface will allow for greater coverage of the deformed soil surface, thus demonstrating how more positions of the soil react to an applied stress.

The properties of soil ultimately govern every structure that is built on land. Specifically, the shear strength of soil determines the maximum amount of stress that can be applied to the ground surface above the soil such that the soil below the surface does not fail. In the event of a shear failure, the soil beneath the surface would deform, thus causing any structure that were to exist on the corresponding ground surface to fail as well. Therefore, knowledge about the soil must be obtained before various structures, including buildings and roadways, can be constructed. To complete this preliminary step in the engineering process, testing of soil behavior under applied stresses must be performed on a soil sample obtained from the site of the proposed structure. To examine the behavior of the soil extracted from the site, triaxial tests are performed to simulate field conditions. During the triaxial tests, the soil deforms, and the ways in which it deforms demonstrate its behavior under various stresses. Ultimately, the improvement of the device in question will provide a better understanding of the ground atop which a structure may be built.

Up until the time I began my research, the idea of civil engineering had only ever been math problems on a piece of paper that would never make it to the real world. Performing research on a topic in the field was the first time I truly felt confident in my choice of civil engineering as a career. While I have learned a lot about the triaxial testing process throughout the past few months, I have also learned that it’s okay to feel absolutely clueless at times. Being given a topic to research that was previously unexplored is a daunting task, but the struggle provides an opportunity to learn how find solutions to many different types of problems.