Full Scale Shaking Table Facilities in E-Defense: a Frontier in Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering

This paper describes full scale shaking table facility in National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED), Japan where the world’s largest shaking table, 20m × 15m, is located. In this facility, which is called E-Defense, two geotechnical experiments were conducted in 2006. This paper illustrates specifically the E-Defense facility by giving an example of a full-scale test on sheet-pile quay wall and pile group which were subjected to liquefaction-induced large ground deformation. Both quay wall and pile foundation displaced larger than 1 meter, and pile group was damaged intensively. Over 800 channel data of various parameters were recorded and some of the results are presented in this paper.

Keywords:

Liquefaction , pile group , quay wall