Empirical Assessment of Liquefaction Resistance of Crushable Pumiceous Sand Using Shear Wave Velocity
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 149, Issue 2
Abstract
Sands consisting of pumice particles are found in the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand. These pumice sands are highly crushable, compressible, and lightweight due to the vesicular nature of the particles, making engineering assessment of their properties problematic. When performing geotechnical assessments of these deposits, questions have been asked whether existing empirical correlations derived primarily from normal (hard-grained) soils apply to the crushable natural pumiceous (NP) soils. Such lack of guidance for the geotechnical characterization and liquefaction assessment of NP soils has long been highlighted by the local geotechnical community. In this research, laboratory experiments, such as cyclic triaxial and bender element tests, were performed on reconstituted and high-quality undisturbed NP samples. These were supplemented by field-based shear wave velocity () profiling conducted at the same sites where the undisturbed samples were collected. For comparison purposes, similar laboratory tests were also performed on the hard-grained Toyoura sand. The laboratory results showed that NP sands have considerably different behavior when compared to Toyoura sand. For instance, NP sands have lower small strain shear modulus () and and higher liquefaction resistance under the same level of packing. Next, results from the laboratory studies and field characterization were synthesized considering the effect of various parameters, such as the degree of packing, overburden pressure, and pumice contents, on the liquefaction assessment of NP sands. Based on the results, attempts were made to develop a chart to estimate the liquefaction resistance of such problematic soils for use by the geotechnical profession. Finally, the applicability of the proposed chart was examined using available case studies from the 1987 Edgecumbe earthquake and then compared with an existing empirical method developed for normal sands. The results showed that the proposed approach better reflected the reported liquefaction manifestation at the sites.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge the advice of Professor Kenji Ishihara of Tokyo University of Science, Japan, in the development of this study. Furthermore, the assistance of Dr. Mark Stringer, Tonkin and Taylor Ltd., AECOM, and WSP in facilitating access to the site and in providing some samples and site details is gratefully acknowledged. The permission to do field testing from Whakatane District Council and Hamilton City Council is gratefully acknowledged. The first author also gratefully acknowledged the Ph.D. scholarship supports from the Natural Hazards Research Platform (NHRP) and QuakeCoRE, a New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission-funded Centre. This is QuakeCoRE Publication Number 0767.
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Received: Sep 16, 2021
Accepted: Sep 26, 2022
Published online: Dec 9, 2022
Published in print: Feb 1, 2023
Discussion open until: May 9, 2023
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