Shaking table study on seismic response of marine reclaimed land

Abstract

Coastal cities in Beibu Gulf of China are creating new lands by reclaiming from coasts, and are located in a seismic zone. The reclaimed land consists of a thick layer of marine soft soil overlain by sand. Earthquake in a soft-soil field usually leads to catastrophe, depending on the consolidation of soil and the amplitude of earthquake. In this paper, a scale model with a typical soft-soil stratigraphic section is presented to study the seismic responses of a soft-soil field under different consolidation conditions. The scale model was sequentially applied with several seismic waves at different epicentral distances to test the horizontal acceleration at different depths. The test results show that consolidation state, the earthquake amplitude and the spectral characteristics can greatly affect the predominant period, the horizontal acceleration amplification factor, and the seismic design parameters. Therefore, the earthquake characteristic and the consolidation state of soil should be taken into consideration comprehensively to ensure the safety of surface buildings on the reclaimed land during the earthquake.

Keywords:

• Shaking table test
• soft-soil
• consolidation state
• predominant period
• site amplification effect
• design ground motion parameters

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Professor Yinghong Qin and Dr. Chenhui Liu from Guangxi University for their valuable guidance and discussion. Waveform data for this study are provided by Data Management Centre of China National Seismic Network at Institute of Geophysics, China Earthquake Administration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51378132 and Grant No. 51708136) and Guangxi Natural Science Foundation Program (Grant No. 2017GXNSFBA198199).

Data availability

The data used to support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51378132 and Grant No. 51708136) and Guangxi Natural Science Foundation Program (Grant No. 2017GXNSFBA198199).