Performance of Advanced Constitutive Models in Site Response Analyses of Liquefiable Soils

The prediction of liquefiable soils response to earthquake excitations represents one of the most challenging achievements in geotechnical earthquake engineering. For this reason, many constitutive models were formulated to capture the main features of such a complex phenomenon, in the different forms of flow liquefaction and cyclic mobility. These models can catch the soil response at the element level, and nowadays their reliability is increasing with reference to boundary value problems too. To this aim, this paper presents the results of mono-dimensional site response analyses by using an existing advanced bounding surface constitutive model that we implemented in the OpenSees framework. The results are compared to those obtained by adopting other constitutive models already included in the platform. The comparison was possible thanks to the availability of the calibration parameters for the Nevada Sand. The outcomes highlight that this newly implemented constitutive model can be used to address the response of a liquefiable soil profile. However, the discrepancies in the response should be further investigated.