State-of-the-art hydraulic servo controlled piezo vibro-cone equipment, has been developed jointly with M/s HEICO, New Delhi as part of DST funded Research Project. The proposed piezo vibro-cone consists of a cone penetrometer coupled with a hydraulic shaker to induce liquefaction locally in the vicinity of probe during penetration at desired depth. The piezo vibro-cone has been designed to have three built-in sensors: (1) Load cell for tip resistance, (2) load cell for skin resistance, (3) Piezo sensor for pore pressure measurement. This facility has been installed at Soil Mechanics Lab, IISc, Bangalore.

The state-of-the-art cyclic triaxial testing facility installed in geotechnical engineering division was developed with the financial support from Department of Science and Technology (Seismology division), Govt. of India, New Delhi, which is used to study the behavior of soils subjected to dynamic loading, liquefaction behaviour and also to estimate the dynamic soil properties such as shear modulus (G) and damping (D) required for design of geotechnical structures subjected to earthquake loading. The system is completely automated and computerized, which consists of servo-controlled submersible load cell (with a capacity of 10 KN) and a hydraulic actuator with frequency range of 0.01Hz to 10 Hz for applying vertical dynamic loading on the sample. The validation of the system as well as majority of development of computer control software for the system was done by me.

Shake table facility, which has been indigenously fabricated by M/s BISS, Bangalore, has the following features. Usable Table size of 1m x 1m, with a provision (i) to fix hydraulic actuators, velocity and acceleration transducers at the appropriate locations; and (ii) to have alternative top plates to represent different roughness of the table-model structure interface, iii)30 kN servo-actuator for horizontal motion. Hydraulic actuators along with a computer and software for the generation of the input signal; cyclic function generator with a frequency range of 0.001 to 100 Hz. My contribution particularly focuses on foundation system for the shake table, civil structures for the facility and development of lesser weight earth pressure cell, accelerometers and pore pressure sensors.

A complete design and scaled drawing was provided to M/s Biomed Instruments, Bangalore for fabricating laminar box. A laminar box is a large sized shear box consisting of several horizontal layers, built such that the friction between the layers is minimum. Hence the layers move relative to one another in accordance with the deformation of the soil inside. The present laminar box which incorporates the idea of rotation of end plates is designed and the same was manufactured by M/s/ Biomed Instruments, Bangalore.

Responsible for establishing two new areas of research In the area of “Rock mechanics and Rock engineering “ and In the area of “Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering”, at Department of Civil Engineering, IISc, Bangalore and developed new courses in these areas of post graduate teaching and organized several national conferences including one brain storming session on earthquake geotechnical engineering. Also he is the author of two books for undergraduate education (Applied elasticity and Geotechnical Engineering Vol I and II) and authored many web courses and edited several conference volumes.