Evaluation of Liquefaction Potential in Saturated Sand under Different Drainage Boundary Conditions—An Energy Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is overall well written. I have the following a few suggestions:

Describe the consolidation stage. Was this stage performed under partial drainage? If it was, the time-settlement curves at various drainage conditions are valuable and should be also presented.  Present the number of cycles for reaching liquefaction initiation for each test. This also requires the definition of liquefaction - strain-based or excess pore pressure ratio reaching unity. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is about energy evaluation of liquefaction potential in saturated sand under different drainage boundary conditions. The methodology and analysis results are well explained. Overall, the paper quality and write up is good, it just need some modifications to be ready for publication. I am presenting my remarks and comments in details below:

 The abstract is full of acronyms (some are not defined properly as “EPWP”). This is a bit early and can confuse the reader easily. The reviewer recommend defining any acronym used in the abstract or just replace it with the full term instead.  For all the experimental results used for comparison the reviewer is under the impression that the shaking used to trigger liquefaction is uniaxial shaking, if this is assumption is true did the authors look at the recent research studying liquefaction and strain energy under biaxial shaking? For example:                                                   Zeghal M., El-Shafee O., Abdoun T. (2018) “Analysis of soil liquefaction using centrifuge tests of a site subjected to biaxial shaking”, Journal of Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering.                                     El-Shafee O., Abdoun T., Zeghal M. (2016) “Centrifuge modeling and analysis of site liquefaction subjected to biaxial dynamic excitations”, Journal Geotechnique. Line 38, typo “lager” should be “larger”. Please correct it. Lines 79 and 212, using “shew” is confusing since it is an outdated version of the verb show and many readers may not even recognize that it is proper but old English. Please change it to “show” or “showed” or “have shown” based on which tense the authors like to use (present/past/past participle). Line 116, using “superior” is a bit misleading as the argument is about the value of a term, using superior is more appropriate if the authors are comparing one method or technique to another one. The reviewer finds that using “larger than” or “greater than” is more suitable in this phrase. Line 249, “liquefaction zoom” the reviewer believes that the authors meant “liquefaction zone”. Please correct it or provide an explanation if you actually meant to use the word “zoom”. Line 348, “A technical” the more appropriate term will be “A technique”. Please modify. The conclusions section elaborates on the results presented in the paper, however a discussion and recommendation(s) about the relation between drainage conditions and liquefaction would make the paper more valuable.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx