Accelerogram-Based Method for Quick Assessment of Liquefaction Occurrence
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 147, Issue 8
Abstract
An accelerogram-based method is developed and validated for the quick assessment of liquefaction occurrence based on ground motion records. In this method, two frequency-related ground motion indices, termed RL and MIFr, are defined and extracted from accelerograms using signal-processing techniques. RL and MIFr indicate the richness of the low-frequency components and the temporal variation rate of the mean instantaneous frequency in the ground motion records, respectively. A new liquefaction database consisting of ground motion stations with both ground motion records and the corresponding liquefaction observations is compiled. Logistic regression is used to develop a new liquefaction classification model that takes RL and MIFr as inputs and calculates a liquefaction indicator (LQI) that can be used to assess liquefaction occurrence. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated and compared with existing accelerogram-based liquefaction assessment methods using a common database, and the method is further validated using a new liquefaction data set. The proposed method demonstrated superior performance, with an overall accuracy of 92.8% for the common data set. The proposed method has promising potentials for applications in real-time disaster mitigation systems and rapid postearthquake loss estimations.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available in a repository or online in accordance with funder data retention policies. The Github repository hosting the developed code can be accessed through https://github.com/qschen/liquefaction-detection.git.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to Professor C. Hsein Juang, who gave valuable advice on logistic regression analysis, to Professor Fumio Yamazaki, who kindly shared the 83 ground motion records from Kostadinov and Yamazaki (2001) for model development and evaluation, and to Professor Arthur D. Frankel, who shared the ground motion records of the 2001 Nisqually earthquake for the model validation. The authors would like to acknowledge the US Geological Survey, GeoNet (New Zealand), NIED (Japan), and PARI (Japan) for making their ground motion databases publicly accessible.
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 147 • Issue 8 • August 2021
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© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Jun 22, 2020
Accepted: Apr 5, 2021
Published online: May 25, 2021
Published in print: Aug 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Oct 25, 2021
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