Sensitivity Analysis of Soil Liquefaction Potential

Abstract

Soil liquefaction is the source of several major damages during earthquakes on the material and human level. Several authors have studied the probability of liquefaction by in situ and laboratory tests and several models have been proposed to calculate the safety factor. But because of various uncertainties in performance function parameters, we adopted in this paper a reliability analysis that considers uncertainties of parameters and model uncertainties. We used the Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) to calculate the probability of failure to liquefaction based on standard penetration test SPT which soil's parameters are modeled by random variables. The reliability results obtained show that the variability of soil’s parameters has an important impact on the probability of liquefaction. A sensitivity analysis based on the coefficient of variation is presented to see the effect of each random variable on the probability of liquefaction.