Study on Cyclic Response of Dry Uniform Soil Deposit Using Shake Table Tests and DEEPSOIL Program

Ground response analysis describes the free-field response of soil deposit to an input ground motion which is used to analyze the instability of soil deposit and surface mounted structures. This paper presents a study of such response of dry uniform soil deposit on bed rock subjected to sinusoidal motion of significant frequency range comparable with typical seismic recordings. For this, a series of single-axis shake table tests were carried out on uniform dry clay, sand and gravel model subjecting sinusoidal motion of suitable frequency ranges. The length-to-height ratio of the laboratory soil model was kept about 1.71 for shake table tests. The models were prepared by dry pluviation technique. The height and rate of pluviation were adjusted accordingly to achieve the target relative density of the soil model. An assessment of the one-dimensional ground response analysis has been carried out for similar characteristics soil column model subjected to identical ground motion using DEEPSOIL v7.0. The result obtained from the shake table tests shows the influence of frequency on response of soil model and the variation of strength and displacement parameters at different depth. These results have been compared with the DEEPSOIL assessment to show the relative difference of the parameters to express the cyclic response of dry uniform soil deposit.