UC Berkeley

For longer than four decades, the current practice for liquefaction triggering engineering assessments have been dominated by case history-based deterministic and probabilistic models. The predictive model proposals have been constituted based on different sets of case histories concerning in-situ test indices, namely standard penetration test (SPT) N value, cone penetration test (CPT) q, and shear-wave velocity (Vs), etc. The present study uses the databases of Cetin et al., Moss et al., and Kayen et al. together to develop a unified liquefaction triggering predictive model within a probabilistic framework. The scope concentrates on the illustrative introduction of the proposed unified reliability-based framework along with the comparative presentation of model predictions. The unified model enables a joint assessment of liquefaction performance predictions at sites, where different in-situ test indices are used individually or jointly to characterize the soil resistance against liquefaction.