Partial Saturation as a Liquefaction Countermeasure: A Review

The liquefaction or softening of the soils and the potential vulnerability of existing buildings on liquefiable soils continue to be of major concern to the public because it has repeatedly caused severe damages to buildings during strong earthquakes, such as 1967 Niigata (Japan), 1999 Adapazari (Turkey), 2010 Maule (Chile), 2011 Christchurch (New Zealand) and 2011 Great East (Japan) earthquakes. Studies on liquefaction have been devoted to realizing the mechanism of liquefaction of fully saturated sands and developing liquefaction mitigation techniques during the last decades. In recent years, some researchers have discovered liquefaction mitigation procedures that are different from conventional techniques. They investigated techniques that involve a reduction in the degree of saturation and the creation of partially saturated zones in the liquefiable soil deposits. Since these techniques are relatively new and their efficiency and applicability to tackle the liquefaction in real projects is still being studied, the existence of a comprehensive literature review seems to be of interest for researchers to shed light on future studies. This literature review intends to present an abstract of the experimental and numerical studies on the liquefaction resistance of sands partially saturated as a liquefaction countermeasure. Also, noteworthy outcomes of the presented studies are presented here, chronologically ordered, in tables.