Civil Engineering Association

The event is a continuation of the series of International Conferences on Unsaturated Soils in Germany. The first International Conference was held during September 2003 in Bauhaus-University Weimar, Weimar, Germany. The current event is the second one in the series entitled “Mechanics of Unsaturated Soils.” The primary objective of the Conference has been to discuss and understand unsaturated soil behaviour such that engineered activities are made better with times in terms of judgement and quality. We all realise by now that in addition to the knowledge on the classical concepts, it becomes an enormous challenging task to adapt convincing new concepts and present them in such a way that it could be used in engineering practices. During the last six years or so (2001–2007), scientific research works were extensively taken up by five scientific research teams from five German universities, whose scientific leaders are Wolfgang Ehlers (Universität Stuttgart), Jens Engel (HTW Dresden), Rainer Helmig and Holger Claas (Universität Stuttgart), Tom Schanz (Bauhaus Universität Weimar), Christos Vrettos, Helmut Meissner and Andreas Becker (Universität Kaiserslautern). The research studies involved theoretical and numerical approaches along with experimental studies on unsaturated soils. These two volumes present recent research findings obtained within this collaboration by the above research groups along with excellent contributions from several research groups throughout the World.