Recent Findings on Liquefaction Triggering in Clean and Silty Sands during Earthquakes
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 143, Issue 10
Abstract
This is the written version of the H. Bolton Seed Medal Award Lecture presented at the ASCE Geotechnical and Structural Engineering Congress in Phoenix, Arizona, February 14–17, 2016. It discusses five recent findings on liquefaction triggering of clean and silty sands during earthquakes. Tools ranging from case history analysis to centrifuge tests were used in the corresponding studies. The findings are (1) pore pressure ratio during earthquakes is more uniquely correlated to cyclic shear strain, , than to cyclic stress ratio (CSR); (2) current penetration and shear wave velocity () charts are associated with small to moderate cyclic strains triggering liquefaction, , that range from to depending on soil characteristics and earthquake magnitude; (3) for recent uncompacted clean and silty sand fills that have not been significantly preshaken, such as those in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, and a Richter scale magnitude , triggering occurs at ; (4) for the heavily preshaken, geologically recent natural silty sands in the Imperial Valley of California, with a liquefaction resistance that is twice as big despite the fact that some of these sands were deposited as recently as the uncompacted fills in San Francisco; and (5) the static cone penetration resistance (CPT) tip penetration resistance of a clean sand is more sensitive to preshaking than , with the CPT capturing better the increased liquefaction resistance due to preshaking.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful to several colleagues that provided extremely valuable help and input to both the Seed Lecture and this paper: R. D. Andrus, J. T. Christian, B. R. Cox, W. El-Sekelly, I. M. Idriss, P. Kokkali, P. Somerville, J. H. Steidl, K. H. Stokoe II, S. Thevanayagam, K. Tokimatsu, M. Yasui, and M. Zeghal. They owe special thanks to Dr. S. Thevanayagam, who conducted the large-scale experiment summarized in Figs. 23 and 24; to Dr. W. El-Sekelly, whose Ph.D. thesis produced the centrifuge results and analysis of both centrifuge and large-scale data presented in Figs. 21–24; and to Dr. J. H. Steidl, who helped with the field data from the instrumented Wildlife site and the earthquake counting summarized, respectively, in Fig. 18 and Table 1. They also thank their current and former students and collaborators as well as the staffs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University at Buffalo for their invaluable contributions both to the Seed Lecture and to the research which resulted in the five findings presented here. They are also extremely grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), for their support over a number of years. Finally, the first author (R. Dobry) wants to thank A. Arias (Universidad de Chile); E. Tamez (UNAM, Mexico); R. V. Whitman, J. T. Christian, and J. M. Roesset (MIT); and I. M. Idriss (Woodward Clyde Consultants) for their invaluable and memorable mentoring of his initial research efforts in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 143 • Issue 10 • October 2017
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©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 22, 2016
Accepted: May 8, 2017
Published online: Jul 31, 2017
Published in print: Oct 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Dec 31, 2017
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