Surface-mounted bender elements for measuring horizontal shear wave velocity of soils

The bender element testing features its in-plane directivity, which allows using bender elements to measure the shear wave velocities in a wider range of in-plane configurations besides the standard tip-to-tip alignment. This paper proposed a novel bender element testing technique for measuring the horizontal shear wave velocity of soils, where the bender elements are surface- mounted and the axes of the source and receiver elements are parallel to each other. The preliminary tests performed on model ground of silica sand showed that, by properly determining the travel distance and time of the shear waves, the surface-mounted bender elements can perform as accurately as the conventional ＂tip-to-tip＂ configuration. Potentially, the present system provides a promising nondestructive tool for characterizing geomaterials and site conditions both in laboratory and in the fields.     

Experimental study of seismic cyclic loading effects on small strain shear modulus of saturated sands

INTRODUCTION Adequate information on dynamic soil proper-ties, especially dynamic shear modulus and dampingratio, is essential for accurate computations of groundresponse and soil-structure interaction problems.Many experimental investigations carried out onsandy soils through resonant column test or improvedcyclic triaxial test in early studies (Hardin and Richart1963; Hardin and Black, 1968; Drnevich and Richart,1970; Seed and Idriss, 1971; Kokusho, 1980) showedthat the small …     

A study on dynamic response of slopes under wave action using simulation tests

1. Introduction At present, the construction of large-scale reservoirworks has given rise to many large-scale reservoirareas, the stabilization of slopes in these reservoirdistricts will be influenced by water waves. Thecirculating hydraulic loading caused by the waveproduces a great force on the slope, and especiallyforms a vibration wave force on the boundary of water surface and the slope earth, and even breaks the water-soil interface, leading to the excess pore pressurechanging along diff…