Congratulations to Mr. Markus Uhlig on the successful defense of his doctoral thesis

On February 24, 2021, Dipl.-Ing. Markus Uhlig successfully defended his scientific thesis within the framework of the doctoral procedure on the topic of "The determination of undrained shear strength in open pit dumps".
As part of his thesis, Mr. Uhlig investigated the time-varying undrained shear strength of dump soils in open-pit mines. In open pit mining, the overburden is excavated and dumped again at its dumping site, e.g. an inner dump. In this process, the dumps form high slope systems, which, like all filled slopes, must be verified. These calculations are based on shear characteristics, e.g., undrained shear strength for fine-grained soils. While this shear strength on the excavation side can be determined by the methods commonly used in geotechnical engineering, this must be verified by other methods for the heterogeneous soils on the dumping side that are undergoing consolidation. In the paper, one such method, a predictive model simulating shear strength development, is presented. In doing so, an existing model was further developed to describe the temporal course and, in addition, the influencing factors as well as the limitations of the model were shown.
In addition to the chairman of the doctoral committee Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Frohmut Wellner, the reviewers were Prof. Dr.-lng. habil. Ivo Herle, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Torsten Wichtmann from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Prof. Dr.-lng. Dieter Dahmen from the TU Clausthal, and Prof. Dr.-lng. Viktor Mechtcherine from the Technische Universität Dresden as members of the doctoral committee.
We congratulate Markus Uhlig on his doctorate and wish him all the best and every success in his future endeavors.