Physical modelling of soil liquefaction in a novel micro shaking table

The physical models are useful to understand the soil behaviour. Hence, these tools allow validating analytical theories and numerical data. This paper addresses the design, construction and implementation of a physical model able to simulate the soil liquefaction under different cyclic actions. The model was instrumented with a piezoelectric actuator and a set of transducers to measure the porewater pressures, displacements and accelerations of the system. The soil liquefaction was assessed in three different grain size particles of a natural sand by applying a sinusoidal signal, which incorporated three amplitudes and the fundamental frequencies of three different earthquakes occurred in Colombia. In addition, such frequencies were scaled in a micro shaking table device for 1, 50 and 80 g. Tests allowed identifying the liquefaction susceptibility at various frequency and displacement amplitude combinations. Experimental evidence validated that the liquefaction susceptibility is higher in the fine-grained sands than coarse-grained sands, and showed that the acceleration of the actuator controls the phenomena trigging in the model instead of the displacement amplitude.