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.
/ref>
See also
* 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 ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Roscoe, Kenneth H.
1914 births
1970 deaths
Alumni of Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Geotechnical engineers
Engineering educators
Rankine Lecturers
Professors of engineering (Cambridge)