Effects of particle shape on the liquefaction resistance of sands

Abstract

The cyclic behavior and liquefaction resistance of sands is a subject area of long standing interest. Difficulties in estimating the liquefaction resistance of sands arise from the combined effects of various factors such as gradation, particle shape, fines content, plasticity, and so on, as well as from a lack of a proper framework for analysis. This paper presents a study that was aimed to investigate the cyclic behavior and liquefaction resistance of clean sands which share the same particle size distribution but different particle shapes. The particle shape was measured by using an imaging-based method. Undrained cyclic triaxial tests were conducted to evaluate the cyclic liquefaction resistance ratio. The test results showed that cyclic resistance decreased with increasing the overall regularity of particles when compared at the same void ratio. But characterization of the cyclic resistance of sand using the traditional packing-density based is difficult partly due to the complicated effect of confining pressure One of the remarkable findings is that the correlation between cyclic resistance and state parameter does not appear to be affected by particle shape, suggesting that the state parameter, defined with reference to the critical state line, may be a suitable state variable to unify the liquefaction resistance for sands with different particle shapes. A critical-state-based framework proposed earlier was extended for liquefaction resistance evaluation taking into account the effects of particle shape.