Seismic Performance of Multi-Story Building with Pile Foundation in Liquefiable Ground Including Post-Earthquake Consolidation Settlement

A multi-story parking building with steel frame was designed and constructed according to the Building Standards Law of Japanese architecture. This study is to investigate the seismic performance of the building during and fter a great earthquake that will definitely hit the central part of Japan in the near future. Special attention is paid to the differential settlement caused by the liquefaction and the long-term settlement after the arthquake. The analysis is carried out by 2D soil-water coupled dynamic/static finite element analysis using a program named as DBLEAVES (Ye, 2011). The input earthquake wave is a kind of 3 synchronization huge earthquake wave whose main shock lasts about 150s with a maximal acceleration of 182 gal. The ground behavior is described by Cyclic Mobility Model (Zhang et al., 2007, 2010, 2011). From the analysis, it is known that not only the liquefaction, but also the long-term settlement after earthquake, should be given serious consideration. Meanwhile, even if the seismic evaluation per the design code is OK, a detailed calculation may reveal the risk of under-estimation due to the shortcoming of such an overwhelming design code. In a word, sometimes an evaluation by an individual engineer will become crucially important.