Top Geotechnical Journal Paper Award

Ricardo Dobry and Tarek Abdoun have been selected by the Geo-Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to receive the Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award.

The researchers, experts in earthquake engineering, received the award for the 2^nd year in a row for the paper "Two Case Histories Demonstrating the Effect of Past Earthquakes on Liquefaction Resistance of Silty Sand". It was published in June 2017 in the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering. The lead author on the award-winning paper was Waleed El-Sekelly, who earned his doctorate in civil engineering at Rensselaer in 2014, and who will return to campus as a postdoctoral researcher this summer. Also contributing to the paper was Jamison Steidl, a research seismologist at UC Santa Barbara.

Two case histories of earthquakes are compared in the paper. The 2010 El-Mayor Cucapah earthquake in California's Imperial Valley and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in northern California. The study includes two sites from its earthquake with silty sand layers to examine the reason why one experienced liquefaction (a phenomenon whereby a saturated or partially saturated soil substantially loses strength and stiffness in response to an applied stress) whereas the other did not. The researchers suggest that a high seismic activity in the Imperial Valley, corroborated by results from centrifuge and large-scale experiments, provided the most probable explanation for the site's higher resistance to liquefaction. The results as well as the methodology developed in the paper could be helpful when analyzing the observed high liquefaction resistance of sandy sites located in other seismic regions.