FoRDy: Rocking Shallow Foundation Performance in Dynamic Experiments

In recent years, numerous centrifuge and 1g shake-table experiments have demonstrated that rocking shallow foundations can be designed as an effective component of a seismically resilient bridge or building structure. However, it is difficult to directly compare datasets from the numerous experiments because they were documented by different researchers with different equipment, objectives and variable definitions. An extensive effort was made to process the datasets from different laboratories in a consistent way to enable users to discover relationships between dependent and independent variables across datasets generated by different research groups. In that sense FoRDy is a dataset about datasets – a meta-dataset. The FoRDy dataset (Foundation Rocking - Dynamic) contains data from a large set of dynamic model tests on rocking shallow foundations. FoRDy contains results of single-degree-of-freedom-like structures on rocking shallow foundations from five centrifuge and three 1g shake-table test series. It includes 13 different structures, 18 different soil profiles, over 50 different ground excitations, and a total of 200 event model case histories. A spreadsheet, called the FoRDy Mastersheet summarizes all of the key independent and dependent variables for each loading event and lists the filenames for supporting data. The supporting data files are also provided. A README document in the “MASTERSHEET AND DOCUMENTATION” directory explains how users may browse and find the data they might need in FoRDy.
A separate but complementary dataset (FoRCy) compiles related data from pseudo-static monotonic and slow-cyclic tests on rocking shallow foundations (Hakhamaneshi et al. 2020). Examples showing how the authors envision the FoRDy data may be re-used are demonstrated by Athipotta-Variam et al. (2017), Gavras (2019) and Gavras et al. (2020).