ISSMGE Bulletin: Volume 8, Issue 4 Page 26
Gopal Madabhushi is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Cambridge and the Director of the Schofield Centre. He has over 25 years of experience in the area of Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering. His expertise extends from dynamic centrifuge modelling to the time domain finite element analyses of earthquake engineering problems. Gopal is a leading expert in the areas of soil liquefaction, soil-structure interaction and liquefaction resistant measures and their performances. He has an active interest in the biomechanics of hip replacement surgeries. He has acted as an expert consultant to the industry on many geotechnical and earthquake engineering problems e.g. Mott MacDonald, Royal Haskonig and Ramboll- Whitby, UK. He has an active interest in post-earthquake reconnaissance work and has led engineering teams from UK to 921 Ji-Ji earthquake of 1999 in Taiwan, the Bhuj earthquake of 2001 in India and many other missions. He served as the Chairman of Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) that runs under the auspicious of Institution of Structural Engineers, London. He has supervised over 20 PhD students and numerous MPhil and MEng students. He was awarded the TK Hsieh award in 2005, 2010 and 2013 by the Institution of Civil Engineers, UK, the BGA medal in 2010 given by British Geotechnical Association, the Shamsher Prakash Research Award in 2006, Medical Innovations Award in 2007 the IGS-AIMIL Biennial award in 2008 and the Bill Curtin Medal in October 2009 by the Institution of Civil Engineers, UK, for his contributions in the area of Soil Dynamics, Tsunami’s and Earthquake Engineering. He has 105 Journal Publications and 240+ papers in International conferences and workshops to date. He has authored a very successful book on the Design of Pile Foundations in Liquefiable Soils (Imperial College Press) and Geotechnical Chapters in the book on Designing to Eurocode 8 (Taylor & Francis). His new book on Centrifuge Modelling for Civil Engineers has recently been published by Spon Press/Taylor and Francis publishing group.
Gopal has developed new equipment to help centrifuge testing. One example of this is the servo-hydraulic earthquake actuator seen above. Using dynamic centrifuge testing, new and interesting failure mechanisms have been identified for a wide variety of problems following earthquake induced liquefaction. In the area of pile foundations in laterally spreading soils, it led to identification of buckling of piles as a failure mechanism as seen above and culminating in the publication of his book on design of pile foundations. More recently PIV analyses were used for earthquake problems to investigate seismic behaviour of tunnels in dry and saturated soils. Tunnel and soil deformation for both these cases can be seen in figures above.
