Travelling wave-induced liquefaction of sand deposits

The sea-floor deposit is assumed to be a saturated porous medium modelled by a two-phase system for which the coupled governing equations are derived from the theory of mixture. A constitutive model based on the generalized plasticity-bounding surface formulation is proposed to describe the soil behavior. An artificial boundary is suggested to deal with the unbounded domain problem. The coupled governing equations and the material model have been implemented into a nonlinear finite element program to analyze the travelling wave-induced liquefaction of seabed deposits. The results of two case studies are presented. The first case examines the response of sand deposit to the wave train at a site of underwater pipelines for nuclear power plants in Lake Ontario where the deposit was found to vary from loose to medium dense. The second case investigates the sea-floor behavior under a storm wave at the Ekofisk oil tank site in the North Sea where the deposit was reported to be dense. The results agree with the ...