Predicting the liquefaction potential of soil layers in Tabriz city via artificial neural network analysis

Abstract

Soil liquefaction is a phenomenon through which saturated soil completely loses its strength and hardness and behaves the same as a liquid due to the severe stress it entails. This stress can be caused by earthquakes or sudden changes in soil stress conditions. Many empirical approaches have been proposed for predicting the potential of liquefaction, each of which includes advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, a novel prediction approach is proposed based on an artificial neural network (ANN) to adequately predict the potential of liquefaction in a specific range of soil properties. To this end, a whole set of 100 soil data is collected to calculate the potential of liquefaction via empirical approaches in Tabriz, Iran. Then, the results of the empirical approaches are utilized for data training in an ANN, which is considered as an option to predict liquefaction for the first time in Tabriz. The achieved configuration of the ANN is utilized to predict the liquefaction of 10 other data sets for validation purposes. According to the obtained results, a well-trained ANN is capable of predicting the liquefaction potential through error values of less than 5%, which represents the reliability of the proposed approach.