Description

The shear strength of liquefied soil is a crucial input to both static and seismic liquefaction analysis of many water-retaining dams, tailings storage facilities, and flood-control dikes. Despite this importance, this parameter often is estimated using empirical or semi-empirical (i.e., incorporating critical state soil mechanics concepts) correlations and very few efforts have been made to systematically increase the number of available case histories. In this talk, Prof. Olson will highlight the collection and expansion of the case history database of liquefaction flow failures, will describe efforts to better incorporate theoretical considerations into case history-based correlations for liquefied shear strength, and will describe recent novel experiments conducted to expand the data available to develop empirical and semi-empirical correlations to estimate liquefied shear strength.