Mitigating Liquefaction

Overview

Objectives/Goals My goal is to find the best way to alleviate liquefaction. Liquefaction is a property of soil where when it's saturated with water and it comes under stress, such as an earthquake, it behaves like a liquid. I want to alleviate liquefaction by adding things to or changing the soil in some way. Methods/Materials There were four repetitions each, where the soil was mixed with sand, mixed with gravel, packed down, and with plain, loose soil (control) completed. I shook a tub with the soil or soil mixture on a track. I put a weighted plastic container as a structure on the soil and a ping-pong ball, representing a sewer, in the soil. Results Of the three mitigations, packing the soil down had the best results. I found that the structure on top of the soil sank the least, which was an average of 2.4 cm, and the ping-pong ball within the soil rose the least, which was an average of 2.5 cm. The control structure sank an average of 4.5 cm and the ping-pong ball rose an average of 3.9 cm. Conclusions/Discussion From this I can conclude that people in a high-risk liquefaction zone should build their structures and utilities on or in packed soil instead of loose soil, gravel-, or sand-rich soil.

Competition history

• CSEF 2017 Earth & Atmospheric Sciences (Junior Division Only) · Entry J0905

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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