Our Lab Manager

Laboratory Manager of BRTS: Dr Darshika Palamakumbure

Darshi has been working at BRTS since the beginning of 2016 and has become a vital part of the laboratory and an accomplished Manager of its work. She is an expert in all the testing methods we use to do Rock Testing, an able teacher of the young Rock Engineers who make up the Laboratory team and Dr Bamford’s right-hand woman.

Since winning the Gold Medal for the Most Outstanding student passing out from the Earth Resources Engineering cohort from the Geological survey and Mines Bureau in Sri Lanka, Darshi has pursued her education in Australia, gaining her PhD in 2015 from the University of Wollongong. (see below for an abstract of her thesis). She was a runner-up in the Young Geotechnical Professionals Night run by the Sydney Chapter of the Australian Geomechanics Society.

She and Dr Bamford have published a paper on Time Dependence (see under Publications) based on her work at BRTS since setting up and developing the Time Dependent Testing Laboratory (TDTL). The TDTL studies the mechanical creep of rocks and with the results Darshi does numerical modelling of tunnel loads, deformations and failure zones. She continues to undertake research activities to develop and implement commercial solutions for clients. Recently, she has modelled the performance of MicroTBMs using the range of measured and friction coefficients.

Please contact Darshi for any questions you have regarding your Rock Testing needs. tests@bamfordrocks.com.au

Abstract of Dr Darshika Palamakumbure’s thesis

GIS – based landslide inventory and landslide susceptibility modelling across the Sydney Basin

The thesis outlines the development of a landslide inventory and a series of large scale slide and flow category landslide susceptibility zoning models for the wider Sydney Basin study area as well as for the Wollongong Local Government Area in NSW, Australia. With these zoning maps, this project has produced a series of planning tools to facilitate the implementation of the AGS (2007) Landslide Risk Management (LRM) guidelines within government. The structure of the NSW based landslide inventory has been redesigned to adopt the world’s best practice. The enhanced MS Access database schema and the GIS spatial database will facilitate the growth of the inventory for the next 5 to 10 years. This GIS spatial database now includes 1840 landslides in total. These landslides comprise 1,435 slides, 273 flows and 132 falls. In general, nine different GIS based datasets were used in the modelling as the landslide causative factors. The high resolution ALS data and NASA Global DEM are the main datasets utilised to produce the DEM and its derivatives.