Jack Montgomery
Auburn University, AL·Engineering·Early-career
Water flowing underground can quietly wash soil away and carve hidden tunnels, called pipes, beneath the surface. This process, soil piping, is a leading cause of levee and dam failures.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
soil piping
internal erosion
unsaturated soils
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Use X-ray micro-CT imaging to determine how soil microstructure controls subsurface erosion rates in unsaturated soils.
- Perform large-scale laboratory experiments that track how soil pipes grow and collapse, combining geophysical imaging with suction, water pressure and surface deformation measurements.
- Develop and validate coupled hydro-mechanical simulations of soil piping and its effect on slope stability, using data from multiscale experiments.
- Build a citizen-science database of sinkholes and piping features alongside teaching modules for undergraduate and grade 7–12 students.
More about the research
It is also a major source of soil erosion and can create voids and sinkholes that damage roads and buildings. Piping may also be linked to rainfall-triggered landslides. Yet the physics of how pipes form and grow is poorly understood, which makes them hard to detect, monitor or repair.
Why it matters
Better ways to detect and evaluate underground soil piping could help engineers protect levees, dams, roads and buildings from failure, sinkholes and rainfall-triggered landslides. The work may also help farmers and land managers reduce soil loss and degradation of agricultural land on hillslopes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mohammad Khosravi
Montana State University, MT·Engineering
Determine how microstructural features such as grain size, ice content and void structure control the large-scale mechanical properties of permafrost, using X-ray computed tomography imaging of frozen soil.
William Likos
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Engineering
Formulate a theory based on a generalized soil water potential, combining capillarity and adsorption, that predicts pore water pressure and ice formation in freezing soil.
Yida Zhang
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Engineering·Early-career
Examine whether self-organization governs how grains in granular soils collectively break under slow, quasi-static loading, and test whether simple universal rules describe crushing in soils with any grain-size mix.
The school
Auburn University: 11 labs on PI Pages, $394M a year on research, 327 research doctorates a year.
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