Abstract

Soil liquefaction is one of the most destructive phenomena caused by earthquakes. Nowadays, it has been mainly studied regarding the risk assessment trough in-situ penetration tests (SPT, CPT) that allow identification of potentially liquefiable layers. However, most of these techniques are limited by site accessibility, cost and amount of information collected during the survey. Development of portable, cost effective and efficient equipment as well as the methods to assess cyclic resistance ratio (CRR) are necessary. This paper presents the first results aimed at establishing a pseudo-empirical laboratory methodology for liquefaction risk assessment of sandy soils through a lightweight instru-mented dynamic penetrometer. A series of dynamic test on sand samples were performed in calibration chamber. Filling material of each sample is sand of Fontainebleau, different density and overburden pressure has been reproduced. On each sample, a dynamic penetration test was conducted and for each hammer blow, strain, forces, acceleration and displacement were recorded as well as dynamic penetration resistance (), computed by wave equation analysis, are obtained. At the end, graphs or charts for correlating qd, density index and overburden pressure are presented in order to assess CRR of soil.