Liquefaction near shallow-founded structures has led to excessive residual settlement, tilt, and lateral sliding in past earthquakes. We seek to advance a performance-based design approach to deal with that problem. Such an approach requires a robust set of predictive tools. In this work, we investigate the dynamic response of a soil-foundation-structure system to assess the influence of key parameters on the response of a single building founded above layered, liquefiable soils. The study begins with a comprehensive parametric investigation of the impacts of various soil, building, and ground motion parameters on settlement. These include: the building's fixed-base fundamental period of vibration; height-to-width ratio; foundation bearing pressure; the liquefiable layer's relative density, depth, and thickness; and various ground motion parameters related to intensity and duration. The numerical simulation uses fully-coupled, 3-dimensional, nonlinear dynamic analyses of the soil-foundation-structure system. The methodology has been previously validated against centrifuge experiments. Among all the parameters, those that matter the most are identified as soil relative density and the thickness of the liquefiable layer. Building fundamental period and effective mass matter to a lesser degree, followed by building height and foundation contact pressure. Most of the parameters become more influential with increasing motion intensity, and some become more or less influential based on the relative density of the liquefiable layer. These analyses provide the basis for developing probabilistic predictive models to estimate the settlement of shallow-founded structures on liquefiable ground.
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