• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.27 no.12
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• pp.107-116
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• 2011

Rigid soil containers (or rigid boxes) are often used for 1g shaking table tests. The rigid boxes, however, do not accurately simulate the amplification of ground acceleration and phase difference of seismic motion in the model ground due to the confinement of shear deformation and the reflection of seismic wave at the box walls. Laminar soil containers (or laminar shear boxes) can simulate the free field motion at convincingly superior accuracy than the rigid ones. In this study, the soft ground is modeled for both types of boxes and is subjected to seismic loading using a 1g shaking table. The comparison of the results using the two types of soil containers illustrates that, in case of the rigid box, the ground acceleration shows non uniform distribution and the phase synchronization of input motion. Whereas, the dynamic behavior of the laminar shear box shows good agreement with the free field behaviors such as the amplification of ground acceleration and the occurrence of phase difference.

• Proceedings of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea Conference
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• 2001.04a
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• pp.100-107
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• 2001

One major problem in the model testing is the boundary effect and size effect caused by the limit in the size of the container. To overcome this problem, various types of laminar boxes are gradually manufactured and used in the shaking table test, which ideally has zero stiffness to horizontal shear. In this study, a small-scale laminar box is manufactured, which is composed of 6 thin aluminum rectangular hollow plates, and its inside dimensions are 300 mm length by 200 mm width by 350 mm depth. Shaking table tests are performed both with the laminar box and the rigid box under the same conditions, where displacements and accelerations are measured at various points of the box and model ground. As result of analyzing the measured data, during the propagation of input seismic motion from the bottom to the ground surface, the relative displacement of the model ground and the amplification of acceleration is hardly amplified in the rigid box. Because of the effect of stress waves reflecting from the rigid wall, the acceleration is slightly decreased at the edge in the rigid box. The laminar box, manufactured in this study, has a problem in that the soil behavior at the edge of ground surface is affected by the inertia force of the top layer due to its excessive self-weight.