Saturation effects on ground motion of unsaturated soil layer-bedrock system excited by plane P and SV waves

2018 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 159-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weihua Li ◽  
Jie Zheng ◽  
Mihailo D. Trifunac
2021 ◽  
Vol 337 ◽  
pp. 03006
Author(s):  
Verônica Ricken Marques ◽  
Antonio Belincanta ◽  
Mary-Antonette Beroya-Eitner ◽  
Jorge Luis Almada Augusto ◽  
Ewerton Guelssi ◽  
...  

In this study, the influence of soil moisture on the bearing capacity of piles founded in an unsaturated clay soil was investigated. The soil studied, composing the upper soil layer in Maringá, Brazil, is lateritic, has degree of saturation between 37% and 70% and has collapsible behaviour when wet. The bearing capacity was determined by full-scale load tests following the Brazilian Standard for Static Load Test. Two pile lengths, 4 m and 8 m, were considered. To analyse the influence of soil moisture, two tests were performed for each pile length: one in soil in its natural moisture content and another in pre-moistened soil. Results show that for both pile lengths, an increase in water content caused a significant reduction in bearing capacity, which is attributed to the decrease in the matric suction of the soil. This is confirmed by the results of the initial evaluation made on the variation of matric suction and its contribution to the bearing capacity with changes in water content. In summary, this study confirms that the pile bearing capacity in unsaturated soil is dependent on soil water content, highlighting the fact that the approach of assuming full saturation condition in the evaluation of the pile bearing capacity in such soil may give erroneous results. Moreover, this study demonstrate that the empirical methods most commonly used in Brazil for pile bearing capacity determination, the Décourt & Quaresma and Aoki & Velloso methods, are overly conservative when applied to the Maringá soil.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kan Han ◽  
Chunxiao Xue

In order to reduce the damage of liquefaction of aeolian sand along the Sichuan-Tibet railway, the dynamic response characteristics of saturated aeolian sand in the study area were discussed by using shaking table test. The results show that the macroscopic characteristics of saturated aeolian sand in the study area are subsidence, water flow and fracture. The displacement time history shows that the surface displacement increases with increasing the input ground motion acceleration. When the acceleration is small (0.1g), the vibration in the soil layer has an obvious tendency to enlarge continuously from bottom to top. With the increase of the acceleration (0.2g), the amplification trend basically disappeared. When the acceleration increases to 0.3g, the ground motion increases first and then decreases.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingyan Lan ◽  
Juan Liu ◽  
Xing Song

Abstract. In the complex medium system of sea area, the overlying sea water and the surface soft soil have a significant impact on the seafloor ground motion, which brings great seismic risk to the safety of offshore engineering structures. In this paper, four sets of typical free field models are constructed and established, which are land model, land model with surface soft soil, sea model and sea model with surface soft soil. The dynamic finite difference method is used to carry out two-dimensional seismic response analysis of typical free field based on the input forms about P and SV wave. By comparing the seismic response analysis results of four groups of calculation models, the effects of overlying seawater and soft soil on peak acceleration and acceleration response spectrum are studied. The results show that when SV wave is input, the peak acceleration and response spectrum of the surface of soft soil on the surface and the seabed surface can be amplified, while the overlying sea water can significantly reduce the ground motion. When P wave is used, the effect of overlying seawater and soft soil on peak acceleration and response spectrum of surface and seabed can be ignored. The peak acceleration decreases first and then increases from the bottom to the surface, and the difference of peak acceleration calculated by four free field models is not obvious. The results show that the overlying sea water and the surface soft soil layer have little effect on the peak acceleration of ground motion below the surface.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (7) ◽  
pp. e0254871
Author(s):  
Tuo Chen

In this paper, considering the far-field seismic input, an accelerogram recorded in the bedrock at Wuquan Mountain in Lanzhou city during the 2008 Wenchuan Ms8.0 earthquake was selected, and numerical dynamic analyses were conducted. The one-dimensional equivalent linear method was implemented to estimate the ground motion effects in the loess regions. Thereafter, slope topographic effects on ground motion were studied by applying the dynamic finite-element method. The results revealed the relationship between the PGA amplification coefficients and the soil layer thickness, which confirmed that the dynamic response of the sites had obvious nonlinear characteristics. The results also showed that there was an obvious difference in the dynamic magnification factor between the short-period and long-period structures. Moreover, it was found that the amplification coefficient of the observation point at the free surface was greater than the point inside the soil at the same depth, which mainly occurred in the upper slope. Through this study, the quantitative assessment of ground motion effects in loess regions can be approximately estimated, and the amplification mechanism of the far-field ground motion mechanism can be further explained. In addition to the refraction and reflection theory of seismic waves, the resonance phenomenon may help explain the slope topographic effect through spectrum analysis.


Author(s):  
Peter J. Stafford

AbstractInversions of empirical data and ground-motion models to find Fourier spectral parameters can result in parameter combinations that produce over-saturation of short-period response spectral ordinates. While some evidence for over-saturation in empirical data exists, most ground-motion modellers do not permit this scaling within their models. Host-to-target adjustments that are made to published ground-motion models for use in site-specific seismic hazard analyses frequently require the identification of an equivalent set of Fourier spectral parameters. In this context, when inverting response spectral models that do not exhibit over-saturation effects, it is desirable to impose constraints upon the Fourier parameters to match the scaling of the host-region model. The key parameters that determine whether over-saturation arises are the geometric spreading rate (γ) and the exponential rate within near-source saturation models (hβ). The article presents the derivation of simple nonlinear constraints that can be imposed to prevent over-saturation when undertaking Fourier spectral inversions.


Processes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minghua Huang ◽  
Dun Li

The consolidation process of soil stratum is a common issue in geotechnical engineering. In this paper, the two-dimensional (2D) plane strain consolidation process of unsaturated soil was studied by incorporating vertical impeded drainage boundaries. The eigenfunction expansion and Laplace transform techniques were adopted to transform the partial differential equations for both the air and water phases into two ordinary equations, which can be easily solved. Then, the semi-analytical solutions for the excess pore-pressures and the soil layer settlement were derived in the Laplace domain. The final results in the time domain could be computed by performing the numerical inversion of Laplace transform. Furthermore, two comparisons were presented to verify the accuracy of the proposed semi-analytical solutions. It was found that the semi-analytical solution agreed well with the finite difference solution and the previous analytical solution from the literature. Finally, the 2D plane strain consolidation process of unsaturated soil under different drainage efficiencies of the vertical boundaries was illustrated, and the influences of the air-water permeability ratio, the anisotropic permeability ratio and the spacing-depth ratio were investigated.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document