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Guest lecture by Ph.D candidate Kaleigh Yost, Virginia Tech
Earthquake-induced soil liquefaction is a phenomenon in which soil loses its strength and stiffness during shaking. Liquefaction can cause excessive damage to the built environment, including cracking of foundations, severe and irregular building settlements, and breaking of utility lines. Current procedures to assess liquefaction hazard struggle to predict liquefaction triggering in soil profiles containing zones of thin, highly stratified sands and silts/clays layers. One contributing factor is that cone penetration tests (CPTs) do not adequately characterize individual layer stiffness and thickness in complex stratigraphies. This presentation will demonstrate the mechanisms causing and controlling this behavior with results from numerical simulations of cone penetration using the Material Point Method; several forward and inverse multiple thin-layer correction procedures will be introduced and correction procedure efficacy will be evaluated.
Kaleigh Yost is a Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech and will join Penn State University as Assistant Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department in January 2023. Her dissertation research focuses on improving earthquake-induced soil liquefaction hazard assessment of complex geologic settings using numerical tools and large laboratory and field case history databases. Kaleigh earned her B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Notre Dame and her M.S. in civil engineering at the University of Texas-Austin