DrDavid Taborda

Overview
Dr Taborda's research has focussed mainly on computational geomechanics and numerical modelling of soil response. During his PhD studies he developed and implemented two different types of constitutive models for the simulation of wave propagation and liquefaction-related problems: cyclic nonlinear elastic and bounding surface plasticity models. Later, he extended the former to include the main features of small strain behaviour of soils observed under a wide range of static and dynamic solicitations.

Simultaneously, Dr Taborda has been researching on the application of optimisation techniques to the calibration and improvement of constitutive models for soils. He has developed in collaboration with the University of Coimbra, Portugal, a computer code aimed at investigating the performance of Genetic Algorithms as a calibration tool.

More recently, Dr Taborda has been focusing on the Energy Geotechnics, with particular emphasis on the development of a thermo-hydro-mechanical formulation for Geotechnical problems and its application to the design of thermo-active structures. Dr Taborda has also been active in Offshore Geotechnics, as part of the PISA - Pile Soil Analysis project, where he worked on the interpretation of field and laboratory data and their use in the calibration of advanced constitutive models for predicting the accurate response of the next generation of foundations for offshore wind turbines.