March 20, 2025, Thursday @ 9:00 am - March 21, 2025, Friday @ 5:00 pm AEST
- Background and general overview of geotechnical earthquake engineering and the ANCOLD Guidelines,
- Refresher of underlying soil mechanics principles,
- Key engineering properties and seismic inputs and how to obtain them,
- Review of analysis approaches,
- Application to real-world examples, and
- Application training
The course is geared toward participants already having some level of familiarity with geotechnical earthquake engineering and soil liquefaction / cyclic softening during earthquakes, and ideally the computer program FLAC/FLAC2D (but not essential). The course will include a review of background information and underlying fundamentals, but the focus will be more on details and procedures important to using the numerical models in practice.
The second day of the course will focus on the constitutive model PM4Sand (and PM4Silt to a lesser extent). It will include
- formulation of PM4Sand (and PM4Silt) models?;
- calibration procedures for engineering applications (single element simulations of various loading paths;
- capabilities and limitations) for both models;
- hands-on calibration exercises;
- challenges and lessons learnt from certain calibrations; and
- a general discussion on the need for the element-level calibrations and system-level analyses to be informing each other
PM4Sand and PM4Silt were developed to model liquefaction and cyclic softening in susceptible soils when subject to earthquake ground motions using non-linear dynamic analyses. The PM4Sand and PM4Silt models are stress ratio-controlled, critical state-compatible, bounding surface plasticity constitutive models developed by Boulanger and Ziotopoulou over the past decade for earthquake engineering applications. They are implemented as user-defined dynamic link libraries for use in Itasca’s FLAC2D program.
NOTE: ANCOLD is not promoting these software packages as being preferred in Australia but recognises that many of our members are/will use this software, and we have an opportunity to upskill our industry through training facilitated by the key developers of these packages, Ross Boulanger & Katerina Ziotopoulou (PM4Sand and PM4Silt)
