Location
St. Louis, Missouri
Presentation Date
28 Apr 1981, 9:00 am - 12:30 pm
Abstract
Because the constitutive laws for soils are governed mainly by interparticle friction, all aspects of their mechanical behavior depend strongly on gravitational body forces. This fact poses serious limitations on the formulation of a materially objective soil constitutive theory, based on experimentation performed on earth. In particular, the presence of the earth's gravity prohibits the design of controlled experiments to properly simulate a variety of critical phenomena associated with the dynamic response of soils to seismic excitation in a very low effective confining stress field. For these reasons, the advent of the space age and, more specifically, the capabilities of the Space Shuttle-Spacelab for several day experimentation by trained specialists in a "shirt-sleeve," laboratory- controlled environment, under essentially zero-gravity conditions, could offer invaluable opportunities for developing a quantitative understanding of fundamental aspects of soil behavior during and after an earthquake, which, in turn, could result in significant technological advances in geotechnical earthquake engineering.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
1st International Conference on Recent Advances in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering and Soil Dynamics
Publisher
University of Missouri--Rolla
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 1981 University of Missouri--Rolla, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Costes, Nicholas C.; Marshall, George C.; and Sture, Stein, "The Potential of In-Space Research on Liquefaction Phenomena and Related Soil Behavior" (1981). International Conferences on Recent Advances in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering and Soil Dynamics. 22.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icrageesd/01icrageesd/session02/22
Included in
The Potential of In-Space Research on Liquefaction Phenomena and Related Soil Behavior
St. Louis, Missouri
Because the constitutive laws for soils are governed mainly by interparticle friction, all aspects of their mechanical behavior depend strongly on gravitational body forces. This fact poses serious limitations on the formulation of a materially objective soil constitutive theory, based on experimentation performed on earth. In particular, the presence of the earth's gravity prohibits the design of controlled experiments to properly simulate a variety of critical phenomena associated with the dynamic response of soils to seismic excitation in a very low effective confining stress field. For these reasons, the advent of the space age and, more specifically, the capabilities of the Space Shuttle-Spacelab for several day experimentation by trained specialists in a "shirt-sleeve," laboratory- controlled environment, under essentially zero-gravity conditions, could offer invaluable opportunities for developing a quantitative understanding of fundamental aspects of soil behavior during and after an earthquake, which, in turn, could result in significant technological advances in geotechnical earthquake engineering.
