Design of horizontal drains for the mitigation of liquefaction risk

Drainage is one of the most popular protecting measures to mitigate ground liquefaction. Deploying the drains horizontally may be convenient where conventional vertical ones cannot be used, like beneath existing structures. The spacing among drains must be designed to limit the pore pressure build-up during shaking. The usual assumptions of radial consolidation around vertical drains, stemming from the assumption of an infinite number of drains, may not be appropriate for horizontal ones, since the latter are generally arranged in few rows at a shallow depth, especially if drainage at the ground level is possible as well. Hence, existing solutions for vertical “earthquake” drains have been modified in this work to take into account such different geometrical features. The resulting solution has been validated against numerical and experimental sets of data. Charts covering a wide range of geometrical layouts, soil properties, and seismic actions are finally proposed. They can be used to design the drain spacing that is needed so as not to exceed the target value of excess pore pressure in the ground.