Cyclic softening and post cyclic volume change of fine-grained soil

A relational database for geotechnical laboratory test data is developed and described herein. The relational database is implemented as part of the Next Generation Liquefaction (NGL) project, and is an extension of the NGL database which contains information about sites, earthquakes, and observations of liquefaction manifestations (or lack thereof) at field sites following earthquakes. The database provides an organizational structure for laboratory test data, which to date has typically not been made publicly available by authors beyond the typical publication channels involving data plots in reports and papers. We believe that making laboratory data publicly available in its digital form has tremendous value for the geotechnical earthquake engineering community, and the database presented herein is therefore an important contribution to our field. We first describe the motivation for creating the database, followed by a discussion of the database’s organizational structure, or schema. We then describe the datasets that have been added to the database and show example queries. We present the manner in which users may interact with the data through the graphical user interface in the future, and how users can interact with a copy of the database in DesignSafe. We then describe updates to the control system for the UCLA direct simple shear test device and present the results of testing performed under this contract , which was significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.