Liquefaction Potential of Unsaturated Nevada Sand Considering Different Intial Conditions

TL;DRAbstract

It has been tacitly assumed that liquefaction does not occur in unsaturated soils during seismic events, because pore air behaves as a cushion and excess pore water pressure is difficult to accumulate. During recent earthquakes, some slopes composed of unsaturated soils experienced large deformation similar to fluid flow. One explanation for this phenomenon is that the unsaturated slopes completely lost their effective stress and reached a state of liquefaction. The field observation shows controversial phenomenon against current understanding on soil liquefaction. This work was motivated to solve this controversy by experimentally studying the following two questions: 1) are unsaturated soils liquefiable? and 2) how do the initial conditions, including relative density, effective confining pressure, and degree of saturation affect the liquefaction potential of unsaturated soils? To answer the above questions, a series of strain-controlled undrained cyclic loading triaxial tests on sat

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