Model Containers
A deformable soil container is necessary to allow realistic boundary conditions during seismic shaking. The developed laminar container has internal dimensions of 1 x 0.4 x 0.4 m (length x width x height), allowing large models to be tested at up to 100g centrifugal acceleration (100 m length in prototype scale). It consists of 20 laminate rings of 20 mm thickness, stacked together through low friction industrial sliders. The laminate rings are free to slide relative to each other (the measured friction coefficient is below 0.01), allowing the contained soil to deform as naturally as possible during seismic shaking. To minimize lateral deformations of the aluminium laminate rings due to the developing earth pressures at 100 g, two lateral supports are added in the longitudinal direction (1m length). The lateral supports are connected with transverse stiffeners to further increase the lateral stiffness, but also to allow mounting of instruments and sensors. In the direction of loading, stoppers are installed to intercept the rings in case of excessive deformation.
The laboratory is equipped with a variety of strong boxes, which are typically used for static monotonic and cyclic loading tests. Most of the strong boxes have a length of 1.25 m (equal to the size of the platform), with their width and height varying from 0.6 m to 1.2 m. Some of these rectangular boxes are equipped with transparent Perspex windows to allow capturing images of the deformed model during the test, which are subsequently processed to compute displacements and stains through PIV. A trap-door container is also available, as well as a cylindrical strong box of 1 m diameter and 0.75 m height (which corresponds to a soil deposit of 75 m depth at 100g).