PROBABILISTIC ASSESSMENT OF THE LIQUEFACTION POTENTIAL OFWATERSATURATED SANDS

摘要

Deterministic models of soil liquefaction give a yes or no answer as to whether liquefaction will occur or not, or ananswer in the form of a factor of safety. In either case, some consideration of probabilities must be made, to answer questionssuch as: Is the risk of liquefaction high enough to justify a large monetary expenditure to improve the ground at a project site,or should the investments already made at the project site be abandoned? Deterministic answers by themselves do notgenerally provide clear-cut decisions in cases where potential failure must be weighed against potential cost.Due to high variation of characteristics of soils and seismic motion and because of difficulties in determining thesecharacteristics with high degree of confidence, probabilistic methods appear to be basic in solving this problem.Simplified procedure of Seed (1979) was used for evaluation of liquefaction potential of soils.This paper introduces an opportunity of applying probabilistic methods for liquefaction risk analyses. The baseproblem in that kind of analyses is estimation of conditional probability of liquefaction. The estimation of total probability ofliquefaction induced by cycling loading is the main purpose of the analyses.