Visual assessment of soil liquefaction hazards in centrifuge testing

The Liquefaction Experiments and Analysis Project (LEAP) is an international effort, which aims at creating a standard methodology to validate numerical models against experimental results. The motivation behind this initiative was the lack of consistency in the produced experimental data at different facilities in previous similar collaborations, which was a significant limitation for the validation purposes. To this end, under the framework of LEAP physical modeling results from different facilities are utilized to evaluate the capacity of repeatability and reproducibility of centrifuge tests at different facilities. This initiative of LEAP includes also numerical exercises, aiming at predicting the soil response by means of the existing constitutive laws, as well as by validating advanced finite element (FE) models, using the experimental response as comparison. The first exercise of LEAP experiments took place from 2015 to 2017 and it involved a sloping deposit of medium dense sand. This paper presents the results of the first experiment of the LEAP 2017, which took place at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).