← 🏚️ Civil Engineering

🏚️ Soil Liquefaction During Earthquakes

Pore pressure:
Effective stress:
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🏚️ Soil Liquefaction During Earthquakes

The simulator shows a cross-section of saturated sandy soil beneath a simple structure, letting users apply earthquake-like cyclic shaking and watch pore water pressure rise in real time as loosely packed grains attempt to rearrange, visually tracking the collapse of effective stress and the resulting sinking, tilting, or floating of objects at the surface.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

The simulator shows a cross-section of saturated sandy soil beneath a simple structure, letting users apply earthquake-like cyclic shaking and watch pore water pressure rise in real time as loosely packed grains attempt to rearrange, visually tracking the collapse of effective stress and the resulting sinking, tilting, or floating of objects at the surface.

🎮 How to Use

Choose a soil condition, such as loose saturated sand, dense saturated sand, dry sand, or clay, set the shaking intensity and duration to represent a given earthquake magnitude, then run the simulation to watch pore pressure build up, grains rearrange, and surface structures respond, comparing outcomes across the different soil types side by side.

💡 Did You Know?

During the 1964 Niigata earthquake, some apartment buildings tilted so far that residents were photographed walking out through windows onto the ground, while the buildings' concrete frames remained essentially undamaged, because the entire failure happened in the liquefied soil beneath them rather than in the structures themselves.