Seismic Behavior and Failure Mechanism of Pile-Group in Mildly Sloping Liquefiable Soils with Crusts: Large-Scale Shaking Table Experiment

A one-g shake table experiment was performed to reveal the failure mechanism of the pile group in sloping liquefiable soils with crusts. The results show that the shallow saturated sand exhibits the alternate behavior of dilatancy and shrinkage, which induces high-frequency peak acceleration. In addition, larger PGA tends to transfer vulnerable positions of the pile in the liquefiable layer from the shallow layer to the interface. Moreover, the pile group effect mainly manifested in piles at the bottom of saturated sand and pile-head during strong earthquakes.