Small Strain Stiffness from in Situ and Laboratory Tests for the City of Noto Soil

The city of Noto is located on the east coast of Sicily, which is one of the most seismically active areas of Italy. The paper shows the results of in situ and laboratory investigations to provide a representative model of ground condition of the city for realistic seismic scenarios response analysis. Moreover normalised laws are proposed to consider shear modulus decay and damping ratio increase with strain level. Special attention is paid to the variation of shear modulus and damping ratio with strain level and depth. The effect of the freezing of the specimen, soil degradation and pore pressure build up were also investigated.