Overview
Done with Prof. Ashish Juneja in the Civil Engineering department at IIT Bombay, addressing sustainability and environmental impact in soil testing methodology. Traditional approaches place measuring instruments directly on or within the soil sample, which can disrupt natural conditions and skew results — especially in heterogeneous or reinforced soil tests like triaxial experiments. This study introduces a non-intrusive alternative: an ordinary digital camera tracks soil movement at regular intervals instead, and the images are digitized with a MATLAB-based Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) program.
Unlike conventional techniques that rely on markers or beads placed in the sample, this method leverages texture differences between adjacent images to map soil deformation directly. Measurement precision improved with larger patch sizes in the test images, and results correlated strongly with traditional on-sample transducer measurements — validating the imaging approach as a viable, more sustainable and environmentally friendly alternative for geotechnical engineering.