On 16 July, 2020, at Prof. Zhang Wengang's invitation, Liu Zhongqiang, the senior advisor of Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI), delivered an excellent online academic presentation for the teachers and students both in our school and other schools. This presentation was held with the aid of Tencent Meeting platform, and the theme of this presentation was Reliability-Based Design in Geotechnical Engineering. This presentation was chaired by Prof. Wen Haijia.

During this presentation, senior advisor Liu Zhongqiang started his speech with the safety concept in the design of geotechnical engineering, and then introduced three design methods of geotechnical engineering with different levels in the order from the low to high, which are working stress-based design method (WSD), load and resistance-based method (RBD), and reliability-based design method (RBD). Then he introduced several relevant concepts about RBD and its applications in multiple actual cases, such as the pile supported jacket, evaluation of dam risks, and the landslides in the quick clay. It was found that incorporating the RBD method into traditional method can achieve better economic gains than before. And he suggested that the deterministic analysis, the probabilistic analysis, and the RBD method should be combined for geotechnical engineering design. At last, Liu Zhongqiang had a discussion in depth with the attended teachers and students. 

This presentation had substantial content and was introduced in a simple way, which attracted many teachers and students from other schools, and the number of attendances reaches 180. This presentation made the attended teachers and students have a deep insight into the reliability-based geotechnical engineering design method, which broadened attendee’s horizon, benefiting the audience a lot.