Liquefaction Assessment in Unsaturated Soils
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 148, Issue 9
Abstract
Liquefaction in soils has predominantly been associated with saturated soils. Under seismic activity, unsaturated soils are may also be susceptible to liquefaction. The implications of neglecting unsaturated soils that are close to saturation as the foremost rule for assessment of liquefaction can be risky and catastrophic. Hence, in this study, a cyclic double-walled triaxial device capable of applying suction via axis-translation technique was modified to conduct cyclic triaxial tests on suction-equilibrated specimens at a low suction state. In unsaturated soils, the presence of highly compressible air within the soil specimens may prevent the effective confining pressure from reaching zero, which is typically considered as initiation of liquefaction. Therefore, in this study, liquefaction was considered to occur when 5% double-amplitude strain was attained in the soil specimen. A series of suction-equilibrated cyclic triaxial test results on unsaturated soils were analyzed to study and verify the possibility of liquefaction in unsaturated soils. Additional suction-controlled monotonic triaxial tests were performed to compare the stress paths of the cyclic triaxial tests with their respective critical state lines to indirectly assess the hypothesis of liquefaction mitigation using an induced partial-saturation technique. It was observed that liquefaction was possible and detected in unsaturated cohesionless soils having relative density of 50% and a degree of saturation of above 70%. However, with desaturation the resistance to liquefaction in soils increased exponentially. This demonstrated the potential for induced partial saturation to mitigate liquefaction in moderately compacted soils whose degree of saturation is reduced to less than 70%.
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Data Availability Statement
All the relevant data and models used in the study have been provided in the form of figures and tables in the published article. The data are also available in a data repository (Banerjee 2022).
Acknowledgments
The experimental work described in this paper was part of a research project funded by the National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Program (Program Manager: Dr. Joanne D. Culbertson; Award No. 1039956) and National Science Foundation’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) program funded “Center for the Integration of Composites into Infrastructure (CICI)” site at UTA and TAMU (NSF PD: Dr. Prakash Balan; Award No. 1464489), and all their support is gratefully acknowledged. Any findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors would also like to thank Dr. William J. Likos of University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. J. S. Vinod of University of Wollongong, Australia, and Dr. Sayantan Chakraborty of Texas Transportation Institute (currently at BITS Pilani, India) for their valuable insights during the experimental phase of the study.
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Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 148 • Issue 9 • September 2022
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© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 8, 2021
Accepted: Apr 26, 2022
Published online: Jun 25, 2022
Published in print: Sep 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Nov 25, 2022
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