Abstract
Soil liquefaction caused by the earthquake vibration is a well-known soil dynamic characteristic and the disasters is self-evident. In this paper, we present a modified finite element-finite difference coupled method, embedding an adaptive time stepping procedure, and conduct the numerical simulations of seismic liquefaction hazards. The adaptive time stepping procedure consists an error estimator and a time stepping strategy, which is specific to the explicit solving scheme. Through the conducted examples of two dimensional embankment, it is found that the seismic liquefaction of soil foundations do induce huge damage to the upper and surrounding structures; by the proposed modified finite element-finite difference method, the displacement and the pore water pressure behaviors are well obtained compared with the traditional method. The computational efficiency is obviously improved; the considerable calculation cost will be saved to the huge model simulations.
