A simple method to approximately determine the damping ratio of soils

By replacing the dynamic stress-strain hysteresis loop with polygon, a simple method of determining the damping ratio of soils approximately is proposed. The method can use test results directly, and by using this method, the process of detemining damping ratio will be simplified. Then the results determined by this method and the traditional ellipse pseudo method are compared, differences are found between them because the actual hysteresis loop recorded in dynamic triaxial tests are not standard ellipse.