Liquefaction susceptibility of clayey sands under saturated and partially saturated conditions

Abstract

Experiences from previous earthquake events have indicated that sands containing non-plastic (silt) or plastic (clay) fines are susceptible to liquefaction. These experiences underline the need for improving the fundamental understanding of the seismic behaviour of silty and clayey sands and for developing appropriate methods to evaluate their liquefaction potential. This paper presents an attempt to elucidate the integrated effects of fines (non-plastic silt and plastic clay) inclusion and degree of saturation on the cyclic behaviour and liquefaction resistance of sands based on systematic experiments. One of the notable findings of the study is that, apart from the familiar mode of cyclic mobility, clayey sand can also undergo flow-type failure under either fully or partially saturated conditions. The unified correlation between the cyclic resistance ratio and the state parameter (ψ), established earlier for clean and silty sand in the framework of critical state soil mechanics, is found to work for clayey sand as well. Furthermore, it is shown that the impact of saturation on the cyclic strength of clean and clayey sands can be reasonably characterised using the compression wave velocity normalised by the shear wave velocity.