Tag : Liquefaction

New Delhi (The Hawk): Scientists have found that the shape of sand grains influences the liquefaction of sand, one of the major factors behind the collapse of structures during earthquakes. Liquefaction of sand is a phenomenon in which the strength and stiffness of a soil is reduced by earthquake shaking or other rapid loading and leads to the collapse of structures resting on the liquefied ground. As natural sand with regular shape liquefies easily, the scientists have concluded that natural sand used in structures like slopes and retaining walls can be replaced with irregular manufactured sand to improve the stability and sustainability. Though the qualitative effects of grain size and grain shape on the resistance of sand to liquefaction are well established, quantitative correlations between them are elusive. Most of the studies in this direction used conventional methods to quantify the grains' size and shape, including sieve analysis and visual observations. In a breakthrough study, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) used digital image analysis for grain shape characterizations and related them to the liquefaction potential of the sands. They found a strong relation between the two. This is because the shear force (unaligned forces pushing one part of a body in one specific direction and another part of the body in the opposite direction) required to break the inter-particle locking is more for the grains with relatively irregular shapes.  Microscopic images of sand particles were analyzed through computational algorithms developed in MATLAB (MATrix LABoratory), which is a high-performance computing platform for analyzing data to determine their shape parameters. Cyclic simple shear tests in which specimens ...