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Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology |
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Environmental
Geotechnical Laboratory |
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We have recently
many huge earthquakes and heavy
rainfalls due to the global warming and
active diastrophism. For examples, the
magnitude of Sumatra offshore
earthquake, which occurred in Dec. 2004,
reached 9.3 and the tsunami due to this
quake killed more than 300,000 peoples
and damaged many facilities. Hurricane
Katrina in Aug. 2005 gave fatal blows to
New Orleans, Louisiana in USA. In Japan,
the 2004 Niigata Chuetsu earthquake,
which was a local earthquake with
magnitude = 6.8, occurred in Oct. 2004.
The quake subjected heavy damages to
structures and facilities including
agricultural ones. We had other
earthquake named Noto peninsula
earthquake this year. Slope failures and
disasters of farms occur due to heavy
rainfalls every year. Then, we are
conducting research works to increase
resistance powers of agricultural
facilities and farms located mainly in
Japan and South-east Asia to natural
disasters on the base of environmental
geotechnical engineering techniques
(soil mechanics, finite element
analyses, unsaturated soil behavior,
elastoplastic theories). The researches
are conducting under geo-environment
rehabilitation and conservation. |
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In our laboratory,
we regard the research topics concerned
with the environmental rehabilitation
and conservation as the ones for
increases of resistance powers to
natural disasters and environmental
conservation of agricultural facilities
and farms. We use environmental
geotechnical methods to conduct the
research works. This figure shows the
flow for solving the problems |
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