49th Cooling Prize Competition

49th Cooling Prize Competition

Wednesday 28th February 2018 at 6.00pm

Friends Quaker Meeting House, 6 Mount Street, Manchester, M2 5NS

The 49th Cooling Prize Competition will be held Manchester on 28 February 2018.

The Cooling Prize is held annually to celebrate the life of the late Dr Leonard Cooling, chairman of the British Geotechnical Society Committee (forerunner of today's BGA), to encourage young ground engineers to hone their technical paper-writing and oral presentation skills.

At the event the three finalists will present their papers:

• Christopher Krechowiecki-Shaw (University of Birmingham): Using traffic as a low-cost treatment for temporary heavy haul loads
• Joseph Newhouse (Mott MacDonald): Ground movement due to shaft construction
• Alexandra Clarà Saracho (University of Cambridge): Microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) to mitigate contact erosion in earth embankment dams

The judging panel will be Arup’s Francesc Mirada, who won the 2017 event, Manchester University’s Domenico Lombardo, Bolton University’s Paul McMahon and BGA chairman Martin Preene.

After the presentations, while the judges consider their verdict, a short keynote lecture will be given by Andrew Smith of Coffey on:

Major Repair Works on the A645 Newland Bridge

Newland Bridge is a 3-span steel composite structure carrying the A645 over the River Aire between Drax and Goole.

Since construction in 1992, the approach embankments have suffered up to 800mm of settlement, causing abutments to displace, damaging bearings, closing movement joints and introducing a large propping force into the bridge deck. If unresolved, the continued settlement could cause further significant if not catastrophic damage to the bridge.

The solution adopted was to replace the upper portion of the approach embankments with “Leca” light-weight fill, thus virtually eliminating future settlement. The damage to the bridge could then be repaired, enabling the structure to achieve its remaining design life.

The presentation describes the problems experienced by the bridge and the methods adopted to design the remedial works.

The meeting flyer can be downloaded here.

Advanced registration required for this evening meeting: please register here.

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