Physical and numerical modeling of the soil inelastic response in a translucent laminar box

Abstract

This work reproduces and analyzes the effects of non-linearity of soil behavior due to 1D propagation of seismic waves. Experimental tests are developed in a laminar shear 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 the monitor-ing of soil behavior directly by a high-speed camera and to compute the deformation field in the soil by the Digital Image Correlation technique. The response of the laminar box was evaluated for a sandy soil using harmonic signals and Ricker wavelets through a frequency range from 0.5 to 5.0 Hz. Afterward, a comparison is made between the displacement field ob-tained 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.