1 Annual Report - The Institution of Engineers Sri Lanka

IESL NSW Young Engineers’ DayIESL NSW Young Engineers’ Day is an opportunity for our young engineers toshowcase their talents. Three young engineers confidently and articulatelydelivered very high quality presentations providing insight into three verydifferent areas of engineering. The lively Question & Answer sessions thatfollowed the presentations benefited both the audience - in getting moreinformation, and the presenters - with suggested improvements to theirresearch areas.Darshana Perera, a PhD candidate at the Centre of Geomechanics and RailwayEngineering, University of Wollongong, gave the first presentation on “Soft SoilImprovement using Vacuum Preloading”. Starting with some examples of historicalbuildings that suffered irreversible damage due to ignoring soft soil improvements,Darshana explained the benefits of using preloading, vertical drains, and vacuumpressure to rapidly disperse pore water pressures thereby expediting consolidationand improvement of soft soils. Darshana’s research work on secondary consolidation/ creep settlement, and the analytical and numerical modeling using Finite Elementmethod to develop predictive models was also explained, with model outputsvalidated through experimental results.