Liquefaction Susceptibility Criteria for Silts and Clays
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Volume 132, Issue 11
Abstract
New liquefaction susceptibility criteria for saturated silts and clays are presented that are based on the mechanics of their stress-strain behavior and which provide improved guidance for selecting engineering procedures for estimating potential strains and strength loss during seismic loading. Monotonic and cyclic undrained loading test data for silts and clays show that they transition, over a fairly narrow range of plasticity indices (PI), from soils that behave more fundamentally like sands (sand-like behavior) to soils that behave more fundamentally like clays (clay-like behavior), with the distinction having a direct correspondence to the type of engineering procedures that are best suited to evaluating their seismic behavior. It is recommended that the term liquefaction be reserved for describing the development of significant strains or strength loss in fine-grained soils exhibiting sand-like behavior, whereas the term cyclic softening failure be used to describe similar phenomena in fine-grained soils exhibiting clay-like behavior. For practical purposes, clay-like behavior can be expected for fine-grained soils that have , although a slightly lower transition point for soils with a CL-ML classification (perhaps or 6) would be equally consistent with the available data. Issues related to the practical application of these criteria are discussed.
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Acknowledgments
The experimental work on blended silt mixtures performed by Steve Romero was supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. NSFCMS-95-9502530. Dr. Yoshi Moriwaki provided data on tailing slimes from his personal files. Dr. Lelio Mejia provided cyclic laboratory test data on the CWOC and Chino sites, as well as other testing data from his personal files. Professors C. C. Ladd and D. J. DeGroot provided data on silts and clays from their personal records. The writers are also grateful for the many discussions and valuable comments provided by Professors J. K. Mitchell, J. P. Stewart, and D. J. DeGroot and Drs. L. Mejia, Y. Moriwaki, and F. Makdisi.
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Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 132 • Issue 11 • November 2006
Pages: 1413 - 1426
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© 2006 ASCE.
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Received: Sep 2, 2005
Accepted: May 20, 2006
Published online: Nov 1, 2006
Published in print: Nov 2006
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