A two-dimensional large-scale shear box on shaking table

Abstract

In order to study the behavior of saturated sands, especially liquefaction under two-dimensional earthquake shaking, a large flexible laminar shear box on a shaking table at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) was developed. The shear box is composed of 15 layers of aluminum alloy frames with a specimen size of 1880 mm × 1880 mm × 1500 mm. Each layer consists of an inner frame and an outer frame, which are allowed to move freely without torsion on the horizontal plane. Thus, the soil at various depths inside the shear box can have motions according to the two-dimensional wave action induced by the shaking table. The sand specimen inside the shear box is prepared by the wet pluviation method. The preliminary test results showed that the performance of the biaxial shear box is satisfactory.