Energy-based evaluation of liquefaction potential of uniform sands

Since behaviors of loose, dense, silty sands vary under seismic loading, understanding the liquefaction mechanism of sandy soils continues to be an important challenges of geotechnical earthquake engineering. In this study, 36 deformation controlled cyclic simple shear tests were performed and the liquefaction potential of the sands was investigated using three different relative densities (40, 55, 70%), four different effective stresses (25, 50, 100, 150 kPa) and three different shear strain amplitudes (2, 3.5, 5%) by using energy based approach. Experiments revealed the relationship between per unit volume dissipated energy with effective stress, relative density and shear strain. The dissipate energy per unit volume was much less affected by shear strain than effective stress and relative density. In other words, the dissipated energy is strongly dependent on relative density and effective stress. These results show that the dissipated energy per unit volume is very useful and may contain the non-uniform loading conditions of the earthquake spectrum. When multiple regression analysis is performed on experiment results, a relationship is proposed that gives liquefaction energy of sandy soils depending on relative density and effective stress parameters.