On the numerical modeling of ground and foundation performance under severe seismic shaking and liquefaction

Abstract eng:
To simulate ground and foundation performance under severe seismic shaking and liquefaction, an advanced plasticity model developed for monotonic and cyclic loading of non-cohesive soils has been implemented to the commercial finite-difference code FLAC, using its User-Defined-Model (UDM) capability. The new model incorporates the framework of Critical State Soil Mechanics, while it relies upon bounding surface plasticity with a vanished elastic region to simulate the non-linear soil response. Stress integration of constitutive relations is performed using a recently proposed explicit scheme with automatic error control and sub-stepping, which so far has been employed in the literature only for constitutive models aiming at static loading. The performance of the proposed numerical algorithm in complex boundary value problems involving earthquake-induced liquefaction has been evaluated, in terms of accuracy and computational cost, via a number of comparisons against the results of centrifuge tests simulating liquefaction effects, such as lateral spreading, bearing capacity degradation and settlement of surface footings, as well as lateral response of single piles.

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