Physical Modeling of the soil inelastic response in a translucent laminar box

Abstract

The present research work reproduces and analyzes the effects of non-linearity of the soil behavior due to 1D propagation of seismic waves. Experimental tests are developed in a shear laminar box which has characteristics of flexibility similar to those experienced by the soil during an earthquake. The main characteristic of the laminar box is a translucent front glass, allowing monitoring soil behavior directly by a high-speed camera. The response of the laminar box was evaluated for a sandy soil using harmonic signal and Ricker wavelets through a frequency range from 0.5 to 5.0 Hz. The translucent front glass makes possible the use of the Digital Image Correlation (DIC) technique to compute the deformation field in the soil. Afterward, a comparison is made between the displacement field obtained from experimental tests and a computational model formulated by the finite element method, which was generated through calibration of a constitutive model of the same soil based on laboratory tests. This article presents first results from a larger study that will consider the physical modeling of semi-buried structures including the non-linearity of soil.