What the VELACS project has revealed

The VELACS project was conducted in order to improve existing methods for the analysis of the consequences of soil liquefaction. The project showed that centrifuge studies are repeatable only under carefully controlled conditions. Most procedures were able to predict the onset of liquefaction in contractive soils, but only effective stress based fully coupled nonlinear procedures were able to predict deformations due to liquefaction. None of the currently available procedures could simulate the behavior of dilative soils adequately. Problems were attributed to improper constitutive model implementation and inadequate calibration.