These proceedings are a continuation of the series of International Conferences in Germany entitled "Mechanics of Unsaturated Soils." The primary objective is to discuss and understand unsaturated soil behaviour such that engineered activities are made better with times in terms of judgement and quality. We all realise by now that in addition to the knowledge on the classical concepts, it becomes an enormous challenging task to adapt convincing new concepts and present them in such a way that it could be used in engineering practices.

The experimental studies reported primarily focus on the role of microstructure and fabric for the complex coupled hydro-mechanical behaviour of cohesive frictional materials. Several papers consider the relevance of temperature affecting the constitutive behaviour of clays. Common features of state of the art theoretical and numerical approaches, including theory of porous media and mixture theory, intend to describe the complex multi-field problems of fully coupled thermo-hydraulic-mechanical-chemical initial - boundary value problems. Applications include highly toxic waste disposals, slope stability problems and contaminants transport in porous media.

These proceedings would have been not possible without financial support by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We gratefully acknowledge the support of ISSMGE, especially TC6 "Unsaturated Soils".

Inhalt
Constitutive Modelling.- Mechanical Model for Unsaturated MX80.- Hypoplastic Modeling of the Disintegration of Dry and Saturated Weathered Broken Rock.- A Framework for Analysis of Diffuse Instability in Partially Saturated Granular Soils.- Interpretation of the Behaviour of Compacted Soils Using Cam-Clay Extended to Unsaturated Conditions.- Independent Roles of the Stress State Variables on VolumeMass Constitutive Relations.- The Soil Water Characteristics of Two-Component Sand Mixtures.- Physical Modeling of SWCC for Granular Materials.- Implications of a Generalized Effective Stress on the Constitutive Modelling of Unsaturated Soils.- Shear Strength of Unsaturated Soils: Experiments, DEM Simulations, and Micromechanical Analysis.- Geochemical Effects on Swelling Pressure of Highly Compacted Bentonite: Experiments and Model Analysis.- Use of State Surface Approach to Explain the Barcelona Basic Model.- Fundamental Methods.- Saturated Elasto-Plastic Porous Media under Consideration of Gaseous and Liquid Phase Transitions.- A Stress-Strain Framework for Modelling the Behaviour of Unsaturated Soils under Non-Isothermal Conditions.- Numerical Simulation of Multiphase Multicomponent Processes Considering Structural Alterations of Porous Media ? a Phenomenological Model.- Flow and Contaminant Transport Model for Unsaturated Soil.- Numerical Modelling of Flow in Variably Saturated Porous Media with Fluctuating Shallow Water Tables.- Residual Strength of Clays at High Suctions.- Parallel Finite Element Analysis of THM Coupled Processes in Unsaturated Porous Media.- Development of an Object-Oriented Parallel Finite Element Code for Unsaturated Soils.- Applications.- Modeling Unsaturated Flow and Atmospheric Interactions.- Mechanical Behaviour of a Clay Layer forLandfill Cap Cover Application: Experimental Investigation and Numerical Modelling.- Finite Element Modelling of Soil-Vegetation Interaction.- Contaminant Transport Modelling Using EFGM.