Soil behaviour under dynamic loading conditions: experimental procedures and statistical trends

Soil behaviour under dynamic conditions is a crucial component of several studies concerned with the environmental effects of earthquakes, risk assessment and geological hazards. This work presents experimental procedures for studying soil behaviour under repeated loading and examines the role of uncertain parameters in the expected soil performance. Laboratory techniques are used to obtain stress controlled cyclic triaxial soil measurements, and a series of test programs are performed in order to study general statistical trends in the response of soils under simulated earthquake conditions, to investigate the processes causing soil failure, and to examine factors that may influence the results obtained in the laboratory.This work has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (Grant no. P42-ES05948 and P30-ES10126) and the Army Research Office (DAAG55-98-1-0289).