Concave-up p-y behavior in liquefied sand has been observed by many researchers due to the dilatant tendency of sand that is dense of its critical state being suppressed in undrained loading. However, static analysis method often scale down the concave-down p-y curves that characterize drained loading, thereby missing the potentially important influence of concave-up behavior on pile response. For lateral spreading problems, large shear strains are typically assigned to the liquefied layer, which presupposes that the liquefied sand is soft and weak. This assumption is incompatible with the strengthening, stiffening concave-up p-y material. This paper presents a static lateral spreading analysis of a pile using concave-up p-y materials to demonstrate how this incompatibility can lead to unrealistic results
