Welcome to the Home Page of The Geotechnical Impact Engineering Laboratories (Geo-Impact, for short). We are a collaboration of researchers, students, and laboratories located within the NYU Department of Civil and Urban Engineering and the Manhattan College Department of Civil Engineering. On this site you will find a description of our facilities, summaries of past and ongoing projects, copies of publications, and credentials of principal investigators.
Geo-Impact aims to be the global technical leader for geotechnical applications of impact engineering. Our focus is on application of engineering mechanics to understand the origin of penetration resistance of natural condensed matter. Our program interests are currently focused on burial of unexploded ordnance in water-over-soil environments, but past work has included terrestrial earth penetrators, anchor embedment, and tunneling. The experimental techniques developed by our laboratories at New York University and Manhattan college include pneumatic projectile launchers, response of soils to dynamic loading, fabrication of large scale soil “targets”, and use of transparent soil simulants. Analytic capabilities include large deformation finite-element codes and the GeoPoncelet penetration model. Geo-Impacts labs are integrated into the civil engineering programs at New York University and Manhattan College, but there are collaborations with other national-level graduate programs as well. Graduation of a cadre of students able to work in government, industry, and academia at the highest levels is the achievement of which we are most proud.
As a service to field engineers, we also provide on this site an interface to our depth-of-burial prediction tool for UXO. In this module we invite users to provide site-description data and munition descriptions, and the GeoPoncelet model embedded in the site will return a stochastic prediction for the depth of burial of UXO based on that munition.