ABSTRACT

PIV has first been adopted for use in geotechnical centrifuge testing by White et al. (2003). GeoPIV, a purpose-built software in MATLAB, was developed for analysing digital images of small scale models in model containers with transparent

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

Measuring of displacements in a dynamic centrifuge test is a difficult task. Both the length and the time are scaled down linearly with the applied centrifugal acceleration. If an earthquake is simulated, the amplitude and frequency of the dynamic load are scaled up by the same amount as the applied centrifugal acceleration. Therefore any measurement technique should be accurate enough to get meaningful results in such harsh conditions. The instruments should also have flat frequency response under applied earthquakes. Therefore, measurement of deformations in centrifuge models poses new challenges for researchers. This paper aims to describe the use of Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) as an optical measurement method in dynamic centrifuge testing of small scale tunnels.