Important Roles of Large-scale Shaking Table Testing in Geotechnics
Important Roles of Large-scale Shaking Table Testing in Geotechnics
The E-Defense facility, one of the world's largest shaking testing facilities, has been in operation for over 20 years since its operation began in 2005. As of September 2025, it has conducted 14 series of E-Defense large-scale geotechnical shaking table tests. The objectives of these experiments range widely, from academic research focused on clarifying phenomena to governmental and industrial research focused on verifying the seismic performance of soil structures and foundation damage monitoring technology. Through these achievements, large-scale shaking table experiments have proven to be a powerful approach, with the advantage of minimizing scaling effects and enabling capture of detailed behaviors. However, conducting large-scale experiments requires significant costs, making it difficult to repeat, and thus they are not suitable for accumulating data, the importance of which has been rapidly recognized in recent years. Therefore, it is essential to explore methods that mutually complement research results based on large-scale shake table tests with other experimental and numerical research. This will require clearly defining the roles that only large-scale experiments can accomplish. This paper summarizes how E-Defense experiments have contributed to both academia and industry. Based on the summary, it reexamines the unique advantages of large-scale experiments and discusses their potential. Also, the issues involved in applying the results of these experiments to capturing actual ground response will be discussed. Finally, as an example of a new challenge, it addresses ground damage during multiple seismic motions and discusses methods for 1-g large-scale shake table experiments to efficiently contribute to solving this problem.
Y. Kawamata
11th International Conference on Physical Modelling in Geotechnics (ICPMG2026)
Special Session 1: Physical modelling – from Practice/Industry to Academia
https://doi.org/10.53243/ICPMG2026-358