The severity of surficial liquefaction manifestation was significantly over-predicted for a large subset of case histories from relatively recent earthquakes that impacted the Canterbury region of New Zealand. Such over-predicts generally occurred for profiles having predominantly high fines-content (FC), high-plasticity soil strata. Herein, the liquefaction case histories from the Canterbury earthquakes are used to investigate the performances of three different manifestation severity index (MSI) models. The prevalence of high FC, high-plasticity strata in a profile is quantified through the soil behavior type index averaged over the upper 10 m of a profile ( Ic10). It is shown that for each MSI model (1) the threshold MSI value distinguishing cases with and without manifestation increases as Ic10increases and (2) the ability of the MSI to segregate cases with and without manifestation decreases with increasing Ic10. Additionally, probabilistic models are proposed for evaluating the severity of surficial liquefaction manifestation as a function of MSI and Ic10. The approaches presented in this study allow better interpretations of predictions made by existing MSI models, although their efficacy decreases at sites with high Ic10. An improved MSI model is ultimately needed that better accounts for the effects of high-FC, high-plasticity soils more directly.
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Assessing the Limitations of Liquefaction Manifestation Severity Index Prediction Models
The severity of surface manifestation of liquefaction is commonly used as a proxy for liquefaction damage potential. As a result, manifestation severity index (MSI) models are more commonly being used in conjunction with simplified stress-based triggering models to predict liquefaction damage potential. This paper assesses the limitations of four MSI models. The different models have differing attributes that account for factors influencing the severity of surficial liquefactionmanifestations, with the newest of the proposed models accounting more factors than the others. The efficacies of these MSI models are evaluated using well-documented liquefaction case histories from Canterbury, New Zealand, with the deposits primarily comprising clean to non-plastic silty sands. It is found that the MSI models that explicitly account for the contractive/dilative tendencies of soil did not perform as well as the models that do not account for this tendency, opposite of what would be expected based on the mechanics of liquefaction manifestation. The likely reason for this is the double-counting of the dilative tendencies ofmedium-dense to dense soils by theseMSI models, since the liquefaction triggering model, to some extent, inherently accounts for such effects. This implies that development of mechanistically more rigorous MSI models that are used in conjunction with simplified triggering models will not necessarily result in improved liquefaction damage potential predictions and may result in less accurate predictions.
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- PAR ID:
- 10392521
- Editor(s):
- L. Wang, J.-M. Zhang
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proc. 4th Intern. Conf. Performance-based Design in Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering (PBD-IV 2022)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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