Liquefaction Potential of Sandy Soil from Small Laboratory Machine Foundation Model

Abstract

Liquefaction is a physical process by which, soils lose their shear strength, liquefaction occurs in loose saturated granular soil due to applying dynamic loads. This paper presents and discusses the results of 54 experimental model tests, all of them were performed on saturated sand under vertical dynamic traffic load prepared at different relative densities (medium and dense), different shapes of footing (square and circular), and different embedment depths (at surface and at depth B) where B is the width of footing. It was concluded that the embedment of square footing in medium sand can reduce the settlement by about 15.2 to 17.3 % when the applied load amplitude equals 0.5 ton, and this percentage becomes 6.7 to 10.5 % when the load amplitude increases to 1 ton, For load amplitude 2 ton, this percentage becomes 9.3 to 10.9 %. Meanwhile, for dense sand, the reduction in surface settlement reaches 25.2 to 42.5 % when the load amplitude equals 0.5 ton, 9.7 to 29.1 % when the load amplitude equals 1 ton, and 12.6 to 23.18 % when the load amplitude is 2 ton. The accumulation of settlement with time was recorded. It was found that the settlement of the all tests increased rapidly to reach at time 17.2 seconds about 33 – 299 % of the width or diameter of footing used; therefore, the failure has been occurring due to occurrence of final liquefaction in the soil beneath the square and circle footing.
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