Planning a monitoring campaign for a natural submarine slope prone to static liquefaction is a challenging task due to the sudden nature of flow slides. Therefore, gaining a better insight by monitoring the changes in pore pressure and acceleration of the soil mass, prior to and at the onset of static liquefaction, of submerged model slopes in the laboratory, helps in quantifying the minimum required triggering levels and ultimately the development of effective margins of safety for this specific failure mechanism. This study presents a set of physical model tests of submarine flow slides in the large-scale GeoTank (GT) of Delft University of Technology, in which a tilting mechanism was employed to trigger static liquefaction in loosely packed sand layers. Novel sensors were developed to locally monitor the hydro-mechanical soil responses acting as precursors of the onset of instability. The measurements indicated that soil instability can initiate at overly gentle slope angles (6–10°) and generate significant excess pore water pressures that intensify the deformations to form a flow slide. Moreover, it was observed that the onset of instability and its propagation are highly dependent on the rate of shear stress change and the state of the soil. The obtained data can be used for the future validation of numerical models for submarine flow slides.

In current modelling of excess pore pressures (EPPs) below marine structures, the irregular nature of cyclic loads and the real storm development are not taken into account. The effect of the irregular cyclic loading in time is investigated in this paper. The wind, wave and turbine loads on a gravity based foundation (GBF) are derived in the frequency domain. The real storm development is based on the CoastDat dataset. The load input is used in a program which takes the generation and dissipation of pore pressures under cyclic loading into account. Also, densification is included. The results show that the first storm in the lifetime of the GBF results in the highest EPPs. The EPP decreases in time, due to significant dissipation and densification during the build-up of a storm. Therefore, not the storms with the largest cyclic loads but the storms with the fastest build-up result in the highest EPPs, since this limits the process of densification. A large scatter is found in the maximum values of EPPs due to the irregular nature of the loads.