FoRCy: Rocking Shallow Foundation Performance in Slow Cyclic and Monotonic Experiments

Numerous centrifuge experiments and 1g experiments by research groups around the world have demonstrated that rocking shallow foundations can be designed to provide re-centering and energy dissipation with little damage to the foundation or superstructure during seismic loading. Each research team has focused on specific response aspects of behavior of rocking foundations and has conducted experiments with different soil profiles, structural properties and ground motions. As a result of this cumulative body of research, the concept of a controlled share of ductility demand between the superstructure and the foundation as a key ingredient for a rationale and integrated approach to the seismic design of foundations and structures has been gaining acceptance within the research and practicing earthquake engineering community. With different specific goals, however, each of the research teams has presented their experimental data in different formats, using different hazard measures, different performance measures, different superstructures, and different foundation shapes and sizes.
This database (FoRCy) contains data from a large subset of slow cyclic and monotonic experiments that has been processed and normalized so that we can perform “apples-to-apples” comparisons of data from different research groups using the same hazard and performance measures. This allows the data generated by different research teams to be directly compared. FoRCy includes data of shear-wall type structures founded on rocking shallow foundations from seven centrifuges and three 1g shake-table tests, thirteen different soil profiles, nearly 70 slow cyclic tests, over ten monotonic tests and over ten different loading protocols. In total this database describes 456 unique event model case histories. This database was previously published by DEEDS at datacenterhub.org, but that database hosting service ended and the data was reformatted in 2023 for archiving at NHERI in the Data Depot of DesignSafe-CI.