Kenneth Harry Roscoe (1914–1970) was a British civil engineer who made tremendous contributions to the plasticity theories of

soil mechanics Soil mechanics is a branch of soil physics and applied mechanics that describes the behavior of soils. It differs from fluid mechanics and solid mechanics in the sense that soils consist of a heterogeneous mixture of fluids (usually air and wat ...

Early life

Roscoe was born in 1914, the son of Col. H. Roscoe, OBE, of Stoke-on-Trent. He was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied the Mechanical Sciences tripos and was elected a senior scholar.Kenneth H. Roscoe - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
pp. 894-6 After a brief period spent as a technical trainee at Metropolitan-Cammell, Roscoe was posted as an adjutant to the

Corps of Royal Engineers The Corps of Royal Engineers, usually called the Royal Engineers (RE), and commonly known as the ''Sappers'', is a corps of the British Army. It provides military engineering and other technical support to the British Armed Forces and is heade ...

Forward Sub-Area in northern France at the beginning of World War II. In 1940 he was captured at Boulogne and spent the next five years in Germany as a

Prisoner of War A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold prisoners of w ...

Work

After returning to the Department of Engineering at

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...

in 1945 as a research student, Roscoe was subsequently employed as a demonstrator, lecturer and reader, before being elected into one of the Professorships of Engineering at the university in 1968. From 1946 he was head of the department's Soil Mechanics Laboratory. In an attempt to advance soil testing techniques, in the late forties and early fifties, he developed a simple shear apparatus in which his successive students attempted to study the changes in conditions in the shear zone both in sand and in clay soils. In 1958 a study of the yielding of soil based on some Cambridge data of the simple shear apparatus tests, and on much more extensive data of triaxial tests at

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

from research led by Professor Sir

Alec Skempton Sir Alec Westley Skempton (4 June 1914 – 9 August 2001) was an English civil engineer internationally recognised, along with Karl Terzaghi, as one of the founding fathers of the engineering discipline of soil mechanics. He established the soi ...

at the Imperial Geotechnical Laboratories, led to the publication of the critical state concept. Roscoe's experiences of trying to create tunnels to escape when held as a prisoner of war introduced him to soil mechanics. His pioneering work lead to the formation of the theory of

Critical state soil mechanics Critical state soil mechanics is the area of soil mechanics that encompasses the conceptual models that represent the mechanical behavior of saturated remolded soils based on the ''Critical State'' concept. Formulation The Critical State concept ...

and what is known today as the Cam clay constitutive model for the behaviour of soils.

Academic Contribution

He was the research supervisor of

John Burland John Boscawen Burland (born 4 March 1936) is an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Investigator at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Imperial College London. In 2016, Burland was elected as a member into the Natio ...

A. Thurairajah Alagiah Thurairajah ( ta, அழகையா துரைராசா ''Aḻakaiyā Turairācā''; 10 November 1934 – 11 June 1994) was a leading Sri Lankan Tamil academic and vice-chancellor of the University of Jaffna. Early life and famil ...

Andrew N. Schofield Andrew Noel Schofield FRS FREng (born 1 November 1930) is a British soil mechanics engineer and an emeritus professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Cambridge. Life Schofield was born on 1 November 1930, the son of Rev John Noe ...

and Peter Wroth. In 1970, he delivered the 10th

Rankine Lecture The Rankine lecture is an annual lecture organised by the British Geotechnical Association named after William John Macquorn Rankine, an early contributor to the theory of soil mechanics. This should not be confused with the biennial BGA Géotec ...

titled "The influence of strains in soil mechanics".Roscoe, K. H. (1970) The influence of strains in soil mechanics. Geotechnique 20(2) 129-170.
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Roscoe, Kenneth H. 1914 births 1970 deaths Alumni of Emmanuel College, Cambridge Geotechnical engineers Engineering educators Rankine Lecturers Professors of engineering (Cambridge)

Early life

Work

Academic Contribution

See also

References