Effect of non-plastic Fines on Liquefaction Resistance Based on the Experimental Results

Abstract

The objective of the paper is to study how fines content influence the cyclic resistance or liquefaction resistance of the silty sands. In addition, the difference between in the laboratory and in-site situation will also be investigated. For the comprehensive study, two types of sands such as local Kaohsiung river sands and Ottawa sands were performed. The testing results reveal that both of static and cyclic strength of the sandy samples decrease with increasing fines content under same relative density. In order to simulate the standard penetration test N1 value, another set of specimens with similar internal friction angle or stress-strain for static triaxial tests were used to conduct the cyclic triaxial tests. If the internal friction angles of the samples were specified to be similar, the test results showed that their cyclic strengths didn’t decrease with increasing fines content. When transforming the laboratory results into the correlation of liquefaction resistance CSR and SPT N1, we can find obviously the increase of liquefaction resistance with increasing fines content no matter whether Kaohsiung sands or Ottawa sands. Some arrow paths in the corresponding figures were used to describe the variations of the liquefaction resistance of the specimens accompanied with fines content. In the meantime, the paths can tell how fines content affect the liquefaction resistances based on the specimens under similar peak internal friction angles or same relative densities.