Abstract
Seismic compression is the accrual of volumetric strains in unsaturated soils caused by cyclic loading and has caused significant damages to buildings and other structures during earthquakes. To date, the available methods for predicting the severity of seismic compression have mainly been simplified procedures, in which a number of equivalent cycles are used to represent the duration of earthquake loading. Often, however, the number of equivalent cycles is computed inconsistently with the underlying mechanics of seismic compression. This paper proposes a non-simplified procedure for predicting the severity of seismic compression. The procedure is based on a modified version of the Richart-Newmark cumulative damage hypothesis, wherein volumetric strain is used as the damage metric. The proposed model was calibrated using data from 425 constant-amplitude sinusoidal strain-controlled cyclic simple shear tests performed on clean sand and validated using test data from samples subjected to variable-amplitude sinusoidal and earthquake loadings. In addition to predicting the severity of seismic compression, the proposed model can be used to compute number of equivalent shear-strain cycles for use in simplified models, consistent with the seismic compression phenomenon. In comparison with other proposed nonsimplified models for computing seismic compression, the proposed model gives good agreement with the measured seismic compression.
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Acknowledgments
This study is based on work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grants CMMI-1030564 and CMMI-1435494, and U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) grant W912HZ-13-C-0035. The authors gratefully acknowledge this funding. However, any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF or ERDC.
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Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 142 • Issue 6 • June 2016
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© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 12, 2015
Accepted: Dec 1, 2015
Published online: Mar 2, 2016
Published in print: Jun 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Aug 2, 2016
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