SPT Based Seismic Soil Liquefaction Triggering Assessment

Seismic soil liquefaction has gained significance following the 1964 Niigata and Alaska Earthquakes. The topic has become a major research stream in geotechnical earthquake engineering field. A number of investigators (e.g.: Seed et. al. (1984), Liao et. al. (1988, 1998), Toprak et. al. (1999), Cetin et. al. (2004) and Idriss and Boulanger (2004, 2008, 2012)) introduced deterministic and probabilistic liquefaction triggering assessment methodologies. The scope of this study is to develop an SPT-based seismic soil liquefaction triggering relationship on the basis of updated (2016) liquefaction triggering case history. For this purpose, Cetin et. al. (2004) database is updated and extended with the current state of knowledge. In the final database, there exist 210 case histories as compared to 200 case histories from Cetin et. al. (2004). Some changes in updated (2016) database as compared to (2004) version are applicable to every case history, for example more robust re-execution of rd and soil unit weights. On the other hand, some modifications are case history specific. Finally, on the basis of maximum likelihood theorem probabilistic CRR boundary curves are developed for the (2016) database. Within the scope of this study, the assessment methodology of the (2016) database and the resulting CRR curves will be presented