Welcome to Delaware Valley Geo-Institute!

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Coming Soon: DVGI Annual Summer Golf Outing
DVGI’s annual Golf Outing will be on Thursday, June 19th at Kimberton Golf Club in Phoenixville. Teams of four DVGI members will compete in a scramble format for prizes such as best score, closest shot to the pin, and longest drive. Best of all, funds netted from the event will be used to support DVGI’s lineup of annual student scholarships of GZA as the ASCE Philadelphia Section’s 2024 Geotechnical Engineer of the Year. Registration is open here; sign up by June 13th!

Recap: May 2025 Dinner Meeting
DVGI concluded its successful run of 2024-25 dinner meetings on Tuesday, May 20th at the Valley Forge Casino. Attendees were in for a real treat as the ASCE Geo-Institute’s 2024-2025 Cross-USA Lecturer, Prof. Richard Bathurst, Ph.D., P.Eng., of the Royal Military College of Canada, presented “From measurement to LRFD calibration of MSE walls.” Prof. Bathurst reviewed how measurements from instrumented full-scale field and laboratory tests of mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls have been used to calibrate load and resistance factors in the AASHTO load and resistance factor design (LRFD) procedure for tensile strength and pullout failure modes of these walls. Such calibrations have improved the accuracy of the MSE wall design process, allowing for more reliable predictions of wall safety and performance as well as value engineering of these structures. Moreover, Prof. Bathurst explained how a simple closed-form solution – easily calculated in a spreadsheet – may be used to incorporate these advances in the LFRD model for MSE walls, negating the need for complex probabilistic simulations for these designs.

Attendees watch eagerly as Prof. Richard Bathurst, Ph.D., P.Eng., briefly reviews the basics of MSE wall design.