IN MEMORY OF A GREAT INVENTOR
Prof. Silvano Marchetti has been full time Professor of Soil Mechanics for over 35 years in L'Aquila University (Italy).
He had as teachers Prof. Jamiolkowski at Politecnico of Turin and Prof. Bishop, Skempton and Morgenstern at Imperial College in London.
In 1981 he was visiting Professor at University of Florida (US), where he carried out one year of research in cooperation with Prof. Schmertmann.
Prof. Marchetti developed original instruments for in situ soil investigations, in particular the Flat Dilatometer (DMT). He delivered special sessions, general reports and keynote lectures in many International Conferences and was invited as a guest speaker in numerous Universities and Institutions across the world. Three International Conferences have been entirely devoted to the DMT: Edmonton 1983, Washington D.C. 2006, Rome 2015. The instrument is currently used in over 70 countries. More than 1000 papers have been published on the DMT by researchers world-wide.
Prof. Marchetti is author of over 80 publications, mainly on practical foundation problems and concerning the use of DMT results. He carried out the determination of design parameters with the DMT in aproximately 1000 construction sites.
He was member of numerous Technical-Scientific Committees, among which the Technical Committee TC16 of ISSMGE on Ground Property Characterization from in Situ Testing.
In 1980 he published in the Jnl. ASCE the basic paper on the DMT: "In Situ Tests by Flat Dilatometer" Jnl GED, ASCE, GT3 (1980). This paper is one of the 78 Historical Papers selected for reprinting in the special ASCE 2003 publication : "A History of progress: Selected U.S. papers in Geotechnical Engineering" which includes papers by pioneers like Terzaghi, Proctor, Casasagrande and Peck.
Diego Marchetti
Eng. Diego Marchetti worked in cooperation with Professor Silvano Marchetti since 2001 and developed the Seismic Dilatometer (SDMT) in 2004.
Together they founded Studio Prof. Marchetti and started the world-wide distribution of the SDMT, which is now used in over 50 countries.
He is coordinator of the production line of the equipment and responsible of the research and development team of the company, with particular focus on nearshore and offshore investigations with the SDMT.
He delivered many technical trainings and supervised SDMT tests in over 70 sites across the world, including several nearshore projects.
Diego is author/co-author of over 30 publications.
He delivers presentations on the SDMT equipment and its applications for geotechnical design in International Conferences or as a guest speaker in Universities and Research Institutes.
The presentation will start with a memorial of Prof. Silvano Marchetti, the inventor of the Flat Dilatometer who passed away on the 21 December 2016.
After a brief introduction on the equipment and test procedure, the presentation will address the interpretation of the data, with particular focus on the key DMT parameters ID, ED and KD and their relation to the geotechnical parameters usable for engineering design. World-wide validations will be shown in international research sites and also in real case projects. The presentation will describe the main applications for which the SDMT test results are used, with some case histories on shore and offshore.