Physical Modelling in Geotechnics – McNamara et al.

(Eds)
© 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-1-138-34419-8

Shear wave velocity: Comparison between centrifuge

and triaxial based measurements

G. Cui, C.M. Heron & A.M. Marshall

Nottingham Centre for Geomechanics, Department of Civil Engineering,
University of Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, UK

ABSTRACT: As part of a project investigating ground-borne vibration using a geotechnical centrifuge, which
involves very small strain shear waves, the need for an accurate measurement of small strain shear modulus (Gmax )
arose. Gmax can be back-calculated from measured shear wave velocities (vs ). Previous researchers have measured
vs in-flight by using an air-hammer device and sensitive accelerometers to detect the speed of the generated shear
wave. However, issues relating to inaccurate position measurement of the accelerometers, background noise,
and the recording of very small signals at sufficiently high frequency can cause errors in the measurement of
vs . This paper compares centrifuge air-hammer based measurements of vs against those obtained from a bender
element system integrated into a triaxial apparatus. The paper details the testing methodologies adopted and
provides results which indicate that the two methods agree well with each other and with predicted values from
literature. The paper highlights how the precise processing methodology adopted can affect the accuracy of the
obtained values of vs .

1 INTRODUCTION involve the vertical oscillation of a single pile embed-

With ever increasing urban population density and the
corresponding need for efficient and expedient means
of transport, rail-based public transportation systems
are a popular choice (such as Crossrail and HS2 in the
UK and the high-speed rail network in development
in China). However, the noise and vibrations gener-
ated by such railways can cause problems in an urban
setting. The need for accurate evaluations of the envi-
ronmental impact of noise and vibrations from these
transport systems has motivated recent research in this
area (Kuo 2010, Nugent et al. 2012).
Yang et al. (2013) conducted centrifuge tests and
numerical modelling to study the effect of the varia-
tion of soil parameters with depth on ground-borne
vibrations. This work highlighted the sensitivity of
ground-borne vibration behaviour to the precise selec-
tion of key soil parameters, such as shear modulus
and damping. However, obtaining accurate values for
these parameters, and how they vary with stress level,
is challenging. This is particularly the case at low
stress levels, near the ground surface, where parameter
values tend to vary significantly.
A research project being conducted at the Uni-
versity of Nottingham is investigating ground-borne
vibrations using a geotechnical centrifuge.This project
focuses on the transmission of vibrations to, or from,
a pile. Vibrations generated by a railway can propa-
gate through a soil-pile-building pathway and affect
the operation of sensitive equipment or cause distur-
bance to occupants (Kuo 2010). The centrifuge tests
ded within a dry silica sand. An accurate evaluation of
soil properties (e.g. dynamic shear modulus) over the
pile depth is therefore required.
Dynamic shear modulus (Gmax ) is one of the most
important parameters in soil dynamics and can be
back-calculated by measuring shear wave velocity (vs ).
Previous researchers have measured vs in centrifuge
models by using an air-hammer device and sensitive
accelerometers to detect the speed of the generated
shear waves. However, issues relating to inaccurate
position measurement of the accelerometers, back-
ground noise, and the recording of very small signals
at sufficiently high frequency can cause errors in the
measurement of vs .
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how air-
hammer based measurements in a centrifuge compare
against shear wave velocities measured from a bender
element system integrated within a triaxial cell. Com-
parisons are also made against two empirical equations
available from the literature. The paper provides an
overview of the testing methodologies as well as details
of data processing, which had an important impact on
outcomes.
2 SHEAR MODULUS
Railway-induced vibration is small (0.1 to 1 cm/s2 )
(Tsuno et al. 2005) and induce soil shear strains within
the very small range (10−6 to 10−5 ) (BS 2005). Within
this range, shear modulus essentially remains constant

137
(i.e. at Gmax ) (Rollins et al. 1998), which can be
calculated from measured values of vs using
where ρ is soil density. There are various factors that
affect the magnitude of Gmax , including confining
stress, void ratio, over-consolidation ratio and geologic
age (Dobry & Vucetic 1987); this study focuses solely
on the effect of confining stress. Gmax is commonly
measured in the laboratory at the element scale using
resonance column, torsion, and bender element tests
(Shantz 2012). Several methods have been developed
by centrifuge modellers to measure in-flight values
of vs , including bender elements (Brandenberg et al.
2006, Lee et al. 2012, Kim 2010, Lee et al. 2014) and
air-hammers (Ghosh 2002, Arulnathan 2000).
Several empirical equations have been proposed
to estimate Gmax of dry sand, including Hardin and
Richart (1963):
and Hardin and Black (1968):
where e is the void ratio of the soil model, K0 is
the at rest earth pressure coefficient, and σm
is the
mean effective stress (kPa). These expressions are both
applicable to the round-grained sand employed in the
current study. Predictions obtained from these meth-
ods are compared against experimental data obtained
from triaxial tests later in the paper.
3 MATERIAL PROPERTIES
HST95 Congleton sand was used for all experiments.
It is a very fine and uniformly rounded silica sand.
The basic parameters of Congleton sand are shown in
Table 1 (Lauder 2010). Samples were prepared by air
pluviation using flow rate and drop height calibrated to
obtain a relative density of approximately 85% (± 2%)
for both the centrifuge and bender element tests.
4 CENTRIFUGE MODELLING AND
AIR-HAMMER TESTING
4.1 Centrifuge modelling
A cylindrical steel container with a diameter and depth
of 500 mm was used for the centrifuge tests, which
were performed at an acceleration of 60 g. The sand
was poured to a depth of 440 mm (26.4 m at proto-
type scale).An undesirable problem caused by the rigid
boundaries of the container is that vibration waves are
reflected back into the model. To reduce this effect,
138
Table 1. Physical properties of Congleton sand (Lauder
2010).
Parameter Value
Specific gravity (Gs ) 2.63
D10 0.090 mm
D30 0.120 mm
D60 0.170 mm
D90 0.195 mm
Minimum dry unit weight (γd min ) 14.6 kN/m3
Maximum dry unit weight (γd max ) 17.6 kN/m3
Maximum void ratio (emax ) 0.769
Minimum void ratio (emin ) 0.467
a vibration absorbing material, Duxseal (Steedman et
al. 1990, Cheney et al. 1990), was used to absorb the
vibrations. The steel container was lined with Duxseal
to a thickness of 19 mm along the sides and 34 mm on
the bottom. A thicker layer was placed on the base to
absorb vertically propagating waves from the end of
the pile.
4.2 Air-hammer setup
A miniature air-hammer (AHA) was embedded in the
sand to generate shear waves. As shown in Figure 1,
the air-hammer is a 10 cm long, 6 mm diameter tube
with a 20 mm long pellet inside. The pellet is made
of 2 PTFE hollow cylinders, an steel cylinder and 2
bolts. To generate the shear waves within the soil, air is
supplied through a tube to force the pellet to impact an
end of the tube. Consequently, the tube moves slightly
in the soil resulting in a small shear wave. A thin layer
of sand was bonded to the surface of the tube to ensure
shear waves are transferred to the soil effectively.
The progression of the shear wave is detected
by a vertical array of four MEMS (Micro-Electro-
Mechanical Systems) (type: ADXL001-70BEZ)
accelerometers labelled AHA-M1 to M4 in Figure 1.
The MEMS have a range of ±70 g and were mounted
on a continual flexible plastic strip to reduce uncer-
tainty in the inter-MEMS distances. The range of
the MEMS is considerably greater than the measured
accelerations generated from the shear wave, however
MEMS with a smaller measurement range and a high
frequency response are not commercially available.
The sensitive axis of the MEMS was aligned with the
horizontal particle motion direction of the shear wave.
A high sampling rate of 100 kHz was used to record
the acceleration time histories from the MEMS to cre-
ate a sufficiently small sampling interval relative to
the shear wave travel time, thereby minimising errors
(Lee et al. 2014).
MEMS were installed at 60 mm (3.6 m proto-
type), 180 mm (10.8 m), 300 mm (18 m), and 420 mm
(25.2 m) from the ground surface (shown in Figure 1)
to measure the average shear wave velocity (vs,AHA,1 ,
vs,AHA,2 and vs,AHA,3 ) of each soil layer (L1 , L2 and
L3 ). All dimensions regarding depths of MEMS and
distances between soil layers, shown in Figure 1, are

Figure 1. Air-hammer and bender element (BE) test setup
(not to scale). Prototype depths/lengths shown in round
brackets ( ).
specified in both model scale and prototype scale. The
average shear wave velocity in a soil layer can be calcu-
lated by measuring the elapsed time for a shear wave to
travel between two adjacent accelerometers (methods
to do this are presented later in this paper).
5 TRIAXIAL BENDER ELEMENT TEST
In this study, a GDS Bender Element System (BES)
was used to conduct the element scale shear wave
velocity tests. A pair of bender elements, capable
of producing separate shear and pressure waves, are
incorporated into the top cap and base pedestal of a tri-
axial cell (Figure 1). The soil samples measured 50 mm
in diameter and 100 mm in length. The wave velocity
is measured in the BES as the time for a wave to the
travel the distance LTT between the source and receiver
elements.
During the generation of shear waves in the ben-
der element (BE) tests, three components appear. Of
them, two propagate at shear wave velocity and the
third travels at pressure wave velocity. The polarisa-
tion of the pressure wave is opposite to the input shear
wave. If the source is too close to the receiver, the
first arrival of the shear wave is masked by the pres-
sure wave. This is referred to as the near field effect.
The pressure wave attenuates quicker than the shear
waves and its effect on readings can be minimised
by increasing the ratio between the tip-to-tip distance
LTT and the wavelength λ of the faster shear waves
(Camacho-Tauta et al. 2012). The length of the tri-
axial sample should therefore satisfy 2 < LTT /λ < 9,
where λ = vs T ; the period T is an input parameter
for the GDS BES. Using values of vs obtained from
air-hammer tests, T for the BE tests was estimated as
0.05 × 10−3 s to 0.1 × 10−3 s. However, it can be seen
from Figure 3 that the near field effect still existed
in the BE tests. A high speed data acquisition system
139
with a sampling rate of 2000 kHz was used to obtain
readings.
Two linear variable differential transformers
(LVDTs) with a range of ±2.5 mm were installed to
measure vertical deformation of the specimen. The
measurement resolution using a 16 bit data acquisi-
tion is 0.1 µm, allowing the detection of very small
axial strains (10−6 ).
It has been found that σv
and σh
contribute equally
to the value of the shear wave velocity, which implies
that σm
in equations 2 and 3 can be taken as (Stokoe
et al. 1985):
σm
= (σv
)0.5 (σh
)0.5 (4)
For normally consolidated dry sand, the relationship
between σv and σh satifies:
σh
= K0 σv
(5)
where K0 = 1 − sin (φ
) (Jaky 1944), φ
is the angle of
internal friction for dry sand. The ratio of horizontal
to vertical stresses applied in the BE tests was 0.5 to
match the anisotropic stress state in the centrifuge with
an assumed K0 = 0.5.
Wave velocities were determined at 11 levels of
confining stress, corresponding to 11 depths within
the prototype soil model, as illustrated in Figure 1.
The tested confining stresses include those evaluated
in the centrifuge to provide a basis for comparing
air-hammer and BE data.
6 SIGNAL PROCESSING
The peak to peak and cross correlation methods are
commonly used to determine wave travel time. The
peak to peak method uses the time difference between
the first two peaks as the travel time. Whereas, the
cross-correlation method works by performing a point-
wise multiplication to determine where two signals
are best aligned. Two correlated discrete signals are
denoted as s[k] and r[k] and the cross correlation
function Tsr [n] is defined as (Rabiner and Gold 1975):
where the parameter n is an integer between positive
and negative infinity.The time shift between two corre-
lated signals is obtained at the maximum (or minimum
if the signals are negatively correlated) of the cross cor-
relation function. The cross correlation method avoids
complications with picking characteristic points (i.e.
first peak) from discrete signals, however the data
length selected may affect results if more distorted data
is involved, as discussed below.
Typical data from air-hammer and bender element
tests are shown in Figure 2 and 3, respectively. The
data from a depth of 3.6 m was chosen here as an
example; data from triaxial bender element tests at
Figure 2. Typical data from a centrifuge air-hammer test. Figure 3. Typical data from a triaxial bender element test
(depth = 3.6 m).
all depths had a similar pattern. background noise and
Table 2. Shear wave velocity from air-hammer testing using
reflected waves. Figure 2 shows that the determina- different data lengths.
tion of a first peak in each of the centrifuge MEMS
data is not straightforward. The MEMS signals in Data length Strikes Mean vs,AHA,1
the centrifuge are affected by several factors, includ-
ing a relatively low resolution of data (9 points over 1 cycle 8 293.7 m/s
one cycle, shown in Figure 2), reflecting waves from 1.5 cycles 8 281.1 m/s
boundaries or elements buried in the soil (pile, piezo- 2 cycles 8 264.8 m/s
electric accelerometers), decay of the wave signals,
and electrical and mechanical noise. These issues are
less pronounced for the first detected cycle (i.e. high-
est signal-to-noise ratio data). Despite this, the low
resolution of data still poses a challenge for imple-
menting the peak to peak method. The output of the
cross correlation method is also be affected by these
same signal quality issues. By including low signal-
to-noise ratio data (i.e. the later detected cycles), the
determined time difference between two signals can be
impacted. It is therefore important to consider remov-
ing the distorted data in order to obtain a higher degree
of correlation and hence a more accurate value for the
travel time. This data length aspect will be discussed
in the following section.
In contrast, the high resolution signals obtained Figure 4. Shear wave velocity comparison using three
from the BE tests (Figure 3) suffer to a lesser degree approaches to analyse BE data.
from these issues, and both the peak to peak and
cross correlation methods prove to be reliable. Fur- using the entire data length (normal xcorr), cross cor-
ther results from these two methods are compared in relation using the first cycle of the shear wave (first
the next section. cycle xcorr), and the first peak to peak method (peak
to peak), as shown in Figure 4. Results indicate that
the peak to peak method agrees well with the first
cycle xcorr method, but that using the full length of
7 TEST RESULTS the data set results in a lower estimate of vs as well as
an unrealistic scattered pattern of vs with depth.
7.1 Cross correlation method
To investigate the effect of data length on cross corre- 7.2 Empirical curves versus BES data
lation results, the mean value of vs,AHA,1 for the bottom
soil layer (L1 ) from 8 air-hammer tests using differ- Equations 2, 3, 4 and 5 can be manipulated to obtain
ent data lengths was calculated. Table 2 shows results expressions for vs :
and indicates that a longer data length resulted in
lower estimations of vs,AHA,1 . This outcome highlights
the importance of considering data with the lowest
possible signal-to-noise ratio.
In addition, three approaches were used to calculate
vs profile from the triaxial BE data: cross correlation

140

Figure 5. Shear wave velocities from BE tests.
where ρ is sand density (1739 kg/m3 ), e is 0.512, g
is gravitational acceleration, and h is soil depth (see
Figure 1). It can be seen from Figure 5 that Equation 8
agrees very well with the bender element test results,
with differences less than 8 m/s. This indicates that
Equation 3 can be used to calculate the shear modulus
of dry Congleton sand. The difference between Equa-
tion 7 and BE data was significant, reaching more than
100 m/s at 20 m depth.
The trend of vs with depth can be fitted with a power
function in the form vs = ah0.25 , where a is a fitting
parameter. Figure 5 shows the result of fitting this
curve to the BE data (BE-curve fitting); a value of
a = 159.6 provided the best fit to the data. This curve
is used for the analysis in the following section.
7.3 BE data versus air-hammer data
The measured shear wave velocities from air-hammer
tests represent mean values across the depth between
MEMS accelerometers (i.e. span lengths L1 , L2 and
L3 from Figure 1). However, the BE test provides the
shear wave velocity at a specific stress level, i.e. depth.
Therefore, in order to make a direct comparison, the
BE data spanning each of the depths (L1 , L2 , L3 ) needed
to be averaged. To do this, the vs = ah0.25 curve fitted
to the BE data was used. The elapsed time t can be
calculated by integrating dh/(ah0.25 ) from h1 to h2 with
respect to h:
Then the average velocity va from BE data can be
obtained using:
where h1 and h2 correspond to the limits of the regions
of L1 , L2 and L3 .
141
Table 3. Shear wave velocities from air-hammer and BE.
Soil Soil Air-hammer BE
layer depth (m) (m/s) (m/s) Difference
L3 (vs,3 ) 3.6-10.8 229.3 258.37 11.4%
L2 (v2,3 ) 10.8-18.0 304.13 310.64 2%
L1 (vs,1 ) 18.0-25.2 347.13 344.43 0.7%
Shear wave velocities of three soil layers from air-
hammer and BE tests are given in Table 3. Shear wave
velocities in Column 3 are measured from air hammer
tests. Shear wave velocities in Column 4 are calcu-
lated using Equation 10. The data indicate that the
middle (2% difference) and lower (0.7% difference)
regions show good agreement. The larger difference
of 11.4% for vs,3 in the upper region is due to sev-
eral factors: (1) the weak signal received by the upper
MEMS, as shown in Figure 2; (2) the low stress lev-
els in this shallow region, causing a relatively poor
coupling between the soil and the accelerometer; (3)
the influence of reflected pressure waves generated
by the air-hammer at the air-hammer end; and (4) the
low signal to noise ratio, making it hard to accurately
distinguish the arrival of the shear wave.
Despite these issues, it can be said that the air-
hammer is a good method to measure the in-flight
shear wave velocity in the centrifuge in a simple,
cheap, and efficient way. However, a greater level of
scepticism should be applied to air-hammer results
obtained near the ground surface.
8 CONCLUSIONS
An air-hammer device in the centrifuge and a ben-
der element system (BES) integrated into a triaxial
apparatus have been used to determine the shear wave
velocity within a dry sand. Details of experimental
methods, the data processing techniques, an evalua-
tion of two empirical methods based on the BE data,
and a comparison between the aim-hammer and BE
shear wave velocity data have been presented. The
main conclusions are as follows:
• The cross correlation method is significantly
affected if more distorted data is included in the
analysis; the data for the first detected shear wave
cycle should be selected from the recorded signals
and used to conduct the cross correlation analysis;
• The empirical relationship for shear wave velocity
proposed by Hardin and Black (1968) fitted well to
the BE data for the sand and test conditions applied.
• The air-hammer and BE data compared well, indi-
cating that the air-hammer can be used as a reliable
method for measuring shear wave velocity in the
centrifuge. However, a higher level of scepticism
should be applied to air-hammer measurements with
distorted or weak signals, or those obtained near the
ground surface.
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