NUMERICAL MODELING OF ONE DIMENSIONAL LIQUEFACTION PHENOMENON

Abstract

Liquefaction occurs frequently in saturated loose granular materials under earthquake and other dynamic loadings such' as blast. Loose granular materials such as sands are susceptible to compaction under vibration or cyclic loading. The dissertation describes the one dimensional FE model implemented in modelling liquefaction and briefly documents the work of Biot's expanded theory in attempts to model more realistic and more complex problems under dynamic loading. The algorithms required to numerically simulating the behaviour of the two primary constituents of geomaterials, solids and water are also documented here. The variation principle is applied to the field equations of fluid flow in a fully saturated porous elastic continuum, and then used the finite element method to numerically solve the resulting coupled equations. Finite as well as infinite element procedures for both the space and time discretization aspects of liquefaction problems have been considered. In both the cases earthquake data has been simulated in order to study the dynamic response of the saturated soil. Both the response of displacement of solid phase and the pore pressure with incremental time step has observed under varying material parameters. In this dissertation the numerical result has been validated with the experimental result in order to check the accuracy of linear liquefaction model.