Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement

DESIGN, INSTALLATION, AND EVALUATION OF GEOSTRUCTURAL PLANT ROOT INSPIRED GROUND ANCHORS

By John A. Huntoon

Advisor:

Dr. J. David Frost (CEE)

Committee Members:

Dr. Rick Deschamps (Nicholson Construction)

Dr. Michael E. Helms (ME)

Dr. Jorge Macedo (CEE)

Dr. Valerie Thomas (ISyE)

Date and Time: August 15th, 2025. 12:00 pm EST

Location: SEB 122 & Microsoft Teams - ID: 252 013 528 937; Passcode: KX2m3Q

Complete announcement, with abstract, is attached.

The Root-Inspired Ground Anchor (RIGA) is a novel ground anchoring technology
which leverages the pullout anchoring efficiency of fibrous plant roots into a round anchor for 
infrastructure applications. Potential reductions in material onsumption, ground anchor 
installation time, and spatial footprint are ypothesized and examined in this thesis. Existing 
understanding of the relevant nchoring mechanisms of plant roots proposes that such an anchor may 
have the ypothesized benefits but does not provide means for practicing engineers to onstruct or 
design geostructural systems using a RIGA. The present thesis describes a proposed mechanism and technique by which RIGAS may be installed
and an engineering design procedure for selecting anchors to meet capacity performance and 
reliability criteria. Laboratory and half-scale field trials provide insights into mechanism design 
and relevant installation effects. Drawing on these insights, novel analytical installation and 
pullout performance models form the basis of an engineering design procedure. Design value 
recommendations for deterministic and probabilistic engineering analysis are provided with 
consideration toward the information available to practitioners designing geostructural anchoring 
systems. Additional discussion of the technology's long­ term corrosion resilience, its life-cycle 
sustainability metrics relative to existing approaches, and its potential economic impacts is also 
provided.