DIGITAL TERRAIN MODELING TECHNIQUES FOR A BETTER SUBSURFACE SOIL LAYERS REPRESENTATION

摘要

Surveyors provide a wealth of data to optimize the civil aspect of capital projects, such as electronic ground data in the form of elevations, ground features, terrain configuration, etc that taken for further processing give the engineers the ability to see a graphical representation of the working site in their computer monitors. Unfortunately in some cases, this information is taken with one discipline in mind: civil engineering, whereas much needed and specific information is required for geotechnical professionals. Data received from surveyors sometimes lack an accurate representation of the ground or terrain features like slope breaking lines, or water flow lines. As the Digital Terrain Modeling or DTM is received in the office, we cannot just assume that this is the accurate representation of our project and when sometimes a site visit is not possible we should employ a DTM post-processing software to evaluate the quality of the information received. The purpose of this paper is to explore available software techniques that could be used to better analyze the data given and interacting with a geotechnical database be able to model a better representation of ground and subsurface conditions in our projects. This paper discusses the different methodologies used to take ground information and thereafter create a proper DTM model of the surface conditions. A Geotechnical database needs also to be properly configured in order to interact with the ground information and depending of the amount data collected we can create an accurate representation of the soil layers in an electronic format, rather than creating soil profiles, interpolating between them and manual connecting the soil layers in a graphical borelog profile report.