Statistical Characterization of Geotechnical Properties

The Hong Kong government has decided to migrate from British Standards (BS) to Eurocodes and adopt Eurocodes for civil engineering structures beginning in 2015. Eurocodes, which replaced relevant BS in Europe in 2010, are probability-based design codes in which a characteristic value of material properties (e.g., soil properties) is used. A soil property characteristic value is defined as a pre-specified quantile (e.g., mean or lower 5%) of the property's probability distribution. In geotechnical site investigation, however, the soil property test data are generally too sparse to generate meaningful statistics or probabilistic characterizations (e.g., mean and standard deviation), making proper selection of the characteristic value a very difficult task. To facilitate the implementation of Eurocodes in Hong Kong, engineering judgment and experience of local soils will be used as supplementary knowledge through the collection and synthesis of local geotechnical property statistics. A comprehensive literature review will be conducted to develop a soil property database for Hong Kong's common soil types. Efforts will be made to collect and synthesize the ground investigation data and reports in Hong Kong. Statistics of common soil properties, such as strength and deformation parameters, will be compiled from the data and reports, and they will be further compared with those developed elsewhere.