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Welcome to the GRC website

The award-winning Geoenvironmental Research Centre (GRC) is a pioneer in the field of geoenvironmental engineering. Established in 1996, the Centre’s guiding principles have been to provide vital research support in a new and emerging area of land-based environmental problems; and to directly translate its research for the benefit of industry.

Problems studied include contaminated land; landfill engineering; land reclamation; slope stability; waste disposal; and heat losses from buried objects. The Centre also investigates the influence of environmental conditions on the performance of underground distribution systems.

Students pursuing largely computer-based projects are well catered for. Research dedicated UNIX mainframes are available and eight distributed UNIX workstations provide powerful computer platforms for CPU intensive computational analysis, computer aided design (CAD), and graphics software. High performance computing facilities also exist via two multi-processor SUN E6500 systems.

For prospective students interested in experiment-based research, a range of both cutting-edge and traditional testing facilities are available. These are supplemented by high quality, computer controlled triaxial testing equipment, and graviometric and volumetric pressure plate extractors, for use in unsaturated soil characterisation.

The GRC has excellent experimental facilities in the area of geoenvironmental engineering. These include leaching columns and triaxial permeameters (used to investigate the effect of contaminated pore fluids on soil hydraulic properties); and analytical facilities for solids, liquids and gases, such as X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence, electron microscopy, gas chromatography, ion chromatography and atomic absorption spectrometry.