Static Liquefaction Analysis Considering Principal Stress Directions and Anisotropy

Static liquefaction failure of a sloping ground occurs when the shear stress applied by a monotonic triggering load exceeds the undrained yield (peak) shear strength of the saturated liquefiable cohesionless soil. Current practices for determining the in-situ undrained yield strength for ground subject to static shear stress either rely on a suite of costly laboratory tests on undisturbed field samples or empirical correlations based on in-situ penetration tests which do not account for the effects of anisotropic consolidation, intermediate principal stress, and mode of shear on the degree of strain-softening and brittleness of cohesionless soils. This study investigates the effects of variations in the direction and relative magnitudes of principal stresses associated with different modes of shear and ground slopes on static liquefaction failure of cohesionless soils. Empirical relationships are developed between soil brittleness index and maximum excess pore water pressure ratio to characterize soil shearing behavior observed in a database of 271 undrained laboratory shear tests collected from the past literature. The application of these relationships for estimating the static liquefaction triggering strength of cohesionless soils under sloping grounds is described for plane-strain boundary conditions and the results are compared with those back-calculated for several cases of static liquefaction flow failures. The proposed procedure incorporates variations in mode of shear and initial stress anisotropy in an empirical formulation based on in-situ penetration tests.