Liquefaction Risk Assessment Using Geostatistics to account for Soil Spatial Variability
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 134, Issue 1
Abstract
Liquefaction triggering assessments are often performed for individual locations, providing little information in regard to the expected spatial extent of liquefaction events. The present paper proposes a method to quantify the potential extent of liquefaction by accounting for spatial dependence of soil properties and potential future earthquake shaking. Random-field theory and geostatistics tools are used to model soil properties and earthquake shaking intensity; this approach facilitates incorporation of measurement results obtained at individual locations within the area of interest. An empirical liquefaction triggering criterion is then used to model liquefaction occurrence as a function of the random-field realizations. The framework components are briefly described and an example analysis is performed to illustrate the details of the approach. The area of liquefied soil under a building in Adapazari, Turkey, is considered in the example, conditional upon soil property measurements obtained from nearby standard penetration tests.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the Managing Earthquake Risks Using Condition Indicators project of the Swiss National Science Foundation. The writers thank Yahya Bayraktarli for managing the soil properties database used for estimation of soil property probability distributions and spatial correlations, and the anonymous reviewers whose insights significantly improved this paper.
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 134 • Issue 1 • January 2008
Pages: 14 - 23
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Received: Jul 17, 2006
Accepted: Apr 20, 2007
Published online: Jan 1, 2008
Published in print: Jan 2008
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