Ground Failure of Adapzari's Fine Grain Soils and Its Interaction with Building Response

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Documenting and learning from observations from major earthquakes are invaluable to advancing the state-of-practice in earthquake engineering. Adapazari suffered the largest level of gross building damage and life loss of any city affected by the Kocaeli, Turkey, Earthquake of August 17, 1999, and subsequent major shaking. The building damage patterns and widespread ground failure in Adapazari provide exceptional field performance data on critical seismic geotechnical phenomena. Because the soils and earthquake shaking in Adapazari are representative of many cases in the United States, the lessons learned from this earthquake are directly applicable to earthquake hazard mitigation in the United State. Adapazari provides an excellent opportunity to evaluate the effect of soil liquefaction and ground softening on the built environment. The effects of liquefaction included settlement, tilting, bearing failure, and lateral shifting of some buildings. The seismic interaction between buildings and softened foundation soils is an especially important feature in Adapazari, as ground failure was more severe adjacent to and under buildings. The primary goals of this research are to analyze the relationship between ground failure and building damage and to assess the cyclic response of soils with significant fines (both plastic and non-plastic). Well-documented case histories of building performance at sites undergoing severe and minor ground failure will be developed through field and laboratory testing. These case histories will then be back analyzed to evaluate the ability to numerically simulate the associated physical processes. Soil-structure interaction analyses are required to evaluate the relationship between building response and ground response on ground and building performance. The PI has formed collaborative research associations with Dr. Turan Durgunoglu of Bogazici Univ. and Dr. Akin Onalp of Sakarya Univ., both of whom will be involved in this project. This research project is a follow-on to a one-year NSF-sponsored study that documented key observations of building and ground performance in Adapazari. Interim and final results of this study will be made widely available through relevant Internet sites to ensure that all researchers and practitioners have access to the collected data. These site are the Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering Server (GEES) of the University of Southern California at <http://rccg03.usc.edu>, the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at <http://peer.berkeley.edu/>, and the EERC website at <http://www.eerc.berkeley.edu>. The release of interim data reports will be announced using the GEOTECH and USUCGER mailing lists. The final report will be released as a web-based report that will be available as an Adobe Acrobat file downloadable from the Internet.