Soil Liquefaction and Cyclic Mobility Evaluation for Level Ground during Earthquakes

It is shown that the design engineer has two basic choices if he considers it appropriate to neglect the possible effects of drainage occurring during the period of cyclic stress applications: (1)To calculate the stresses induced in the ground by the design earthquake, and to compare these stresses with those required to cause cyclic mobility or liquefaction of representative samples in the laboratory. The main problem in this approach lies in correctly assessing the characteristics of the in-situ deposit from laboratory tests performed on even good quality undisturbed samples. (2)to be guided by the known field performance of sand deposits correlated with some measure of in-situ characteristics, such as the standard penetration test. In some cases it is desirable to evaluate the possible effects of pore pressure dissipation in different layers of a deposit during and following earthquake shaking. Methods of accomplishing this are reviewed and described.