ABSTRACT
Geotechnical centrifuges have been successfully used to study Soil-Structure Interaction (SSI) problems. There is growing demand to conduct SSI tests for large prototype systems. Consequently, these experiments should be done either in larger centrifuge facilities or in higher centripetal acceleration fields. However, earthquake actuators which can produce seismic load with very high frequencies are not currently available. An innovative solution would be developing new scaling factors between a prototype and a physical model, so that dynamic experiments with high scaling factors can be done in lower acceleration fields. In this study, the capability of the “two-stage scaling” method is experimentally evaluated. Two models representing the same prototype were designed based on the conventional centrifuge scaling factors and the proposed method. Dynamic responses of the models in the prototype scale were approximately similar. The method was more successful to capture the inertial interaction effects than the kinematic interaction effects.
