Elementary empirical model to assess seismic soil liquefaction

Liquefaction potential (LP) assessment plays a significant role in damages due to earthquake. The spirit underlying the present work is the evaluation of LP by correlating most significant parameters reflecting the dynamic response of soil with actual field behavior wherein an attempt of integrating the effect of dynamic soil properties and ground motion parameters simulating the actual site conditions is being made. Accordingly, a dynamic response–based Elementary Empirical Liquefaction Model (EELM) is proposed by processing a total of 314 reported case records covering a wide range of parameters demarcating “yes” and “no” zones of liquefaction. The method to develop the EELM essentially consists of evaluation of liquefaction potential, defining functional form of EELM representing dynamic response of soil to earthquake shaking, collection of data, computation of model parameters and formulation followed by validation of the model. The proposed empirical model though in fundamental form is found to perform fairly well resulting into an overall success rate of 86 % for both liquefaction and non-liquefaction points with significantly high success rate of 98 % for liquefied cases. Comparison of predictive performance of the proposed EELM with other approaches shows higher efficiency and thus signifies the theme of employing integrated approach. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013