Reliability analysis of soil liquefaction based on standard penetration test

A review of probabilistic and deterministic liquefaction evaluation procedures reveals that there is a need for a comprehensive approach that accounts for different sources of uncertainty in liquefaction evaluations. For the same set of input parameters, different models provide different factors of safety and/or probabilities of liquefaction. To account for the different uncertainties, including both the model and measurement uncertainties, reliability analysis is necessary. This paper presents a review and comparative study of such reliability approaches that can be used to obtain the probability of liquefaction and the corresponding factor of safety. Using a simplified deterministic Seed method, this reliability analysis has been performed. The probability of liquefaction along with the corresponding factor of safety have been determined based on a first order second moment (FOSM) method, an advanced FOSM (Hasofer–Lind) reliability method, a point estimation method (PEM) and a Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) method. A combined method that uses both FOSM and PEM is presented and found to be simple and reliable for liquefaction analysis. Based on the FOSM reliability approach, the minimum safety factor value to be adopted for soil liquefaction analysis (depending on the variability of soil resistance, shear stress parameters and acceptable risk) has been studied and a new design safety factor based on a reliability approach is proposed.