Laboratory Component of Next Generation Liquefaction Database and System Analysis of Important Case Histories

Kenneth S. Hudson, Paolo Zimmaro, Scott J. Brandenberg, & Jonathan P. Stewart

Published August 16, 2021, SCEC Contribution #11656, 2021 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #051 (PDF)

The Next Generation Liquefaction (NGL) project has developed an online relational database of liquefaction case histories to support model development, which is available online at http://nextgenerationliquefaction.org/. The NGL field testing database was recently expanded to include the results of laboratory testing programs because such results can inform aspects of liquefaction models that are poorly constrained by case histories alone. This presentation describes the laboratory component of the NGL database including triaxial and direct simple shear testing, consolidation testing, and index testing. Data are organized by a schema describing tables, fields, and relationships among the tables. Metadata describing attributes of the test specimens are related to the test data using keys that relate tables. The types of information available in the database are test-specific and include processed-data quantities such as stress and strain rather than raw data such as load and displacement. Information uploaded to the database is reviewed by a database working group to verify consistency between uploaded data and source documents. The database is replicated in DesignSafe-CI where users can write queries in Python scripts within Jupyter notebooks to interact with the data. Additionally, analysis on important case histories is presented as examples of what can be done using the database and the cloud computing capabilities within DesignSafe-CI. These involve determining system effects within a soil profile that determine whether liquefaction will manifest at the surface given the earthquake shaking demand.

Citation
Hudson, K. S., Zimmaro, P., Brandenberg, S. J., & Stewart, J. P. (2021, 08). Laboratory Component of Next Generation Liquefaction Database and System Analysis of Important Case Histories. Poster Presentation at 2021 SCEC Annual Meeting.

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