the use of various slags as by-products of steel industry is well established in civil engineering applications. however, the use of bos slag in the area of soil stabilization has not been fully researched and developed despite having similar chemical composition and mineralogy to that of portland cement. this paper reports on efforts to extend the use of bos slag to soil stabilization by deter...

Determination of the internal stability of reinforced soil walls under earthquake conditions is an important part of seismic design. The horizontal method of slices is used for determining internal stability or for tieback analysis of the reinforced soil wall. A pseudo-dynamic method is adopted in the present analysis, which considers the effect of phase difference in both the shear and primary...

A continuum-based finite-element methodology is established for quantifying the stability of earthen embankments built on saturated soil deposits. Within the methodology the soil is treated as a fluid-solid porous medium, in which the soil skeleton’s constitutive behavior is modeled using a smooth elastoplastic cap model that features continuous coupling between deviatoric and volumetric plasti...

Improving swine effluent management practices requires understanding of the fate of nutrients derived from swine effluent in soil quality. This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of long-term swine lagoon effluent application on nutrient distribution in an alkaline Okolona silty clay, an acidic Vaiden silty clay, and a Brooksville silty clay loam. Swine effluent has been applied using ...

Wireless underground sensor networks (WUSN) are a natural extension of the wireless sensor networks (WSN) phenomenon to the underground environment. In this work, experimental measurements are presented at the frequency of 433 MHz, which show a good agreement with the theoretical studies. Experiments are run to examine the received signal strength and the packet error rate for aboveground-to-un...

Plant-soil feedbacks and interspecific competition are ubiquitous interactions that strongly influence the performance of plants. Yet few studies have examined whether the strength of these interactions corresponds with the abundance of plant species in the field, or whether feedbacks and competition interact in ways that either ameliorate or exacerbate their effects in isolation. We sampled so...

Plant diversity loss impairs ecosystem functioning, including important effects on soil. Most studies that have explored plant diversity effects belowground, however, have largely focused on biological processes. As such, our understanding of how plant diversity impacts the soil physical environment remains limited, despite the fundamental role soil physical structure plays in ensuring soil fun...