Published Paper Details:

Liquefaction is one of the devastating effects of earthquake. It has occurred even before the recorded cases in the history. Liquefaction causes not only failure of super-structure but also produces instability of sub-structure, which results into catastrophic damages. Liquefaction is the term commonly used to describe the sudden, dramatic strength loss which mostly occurs in sands during seismic loading. It is a consequence of increased pore pressure and reduced effective stresses resulted into the transformation from a solid state to a liquefied state of soil. While most frequently associated with cohesion-less soils and dynamic loadings, it has been reported in all types of soils ranging from fine-grained to gravelly type soil under both dynamic and static loadings depending upon extent of the seismic and environmental factors. It is the globally recognized prediction standard for identification of liquefaction of mixture of sand with fines. To achieve the objective, the present research work commenced with the literature review for the identification of existing prominent liquefaction susceptibility criteria. It was beneficial to extract the significant soil parameters from the prominent eight criteria. The comparison among these criteria revealed the discrepancies regarding the selection of liquefaction parameters and their ranges. The root-cause for the discrepancies in the pre-existing criteria is their site-dependency. It was observed that the database comprised mostly the same parameters of database of sandy soil. Hence it was converted in terms of parameters considered for prominent criteria by using the basic geo-technical relations and the conversion charts by carrying out more than 1000 computations. The total database for fine grained soil comprises 291 data-cases, with 194 liquefied cases and 97 non-liquefied cases. The final output of this method was the regression equation giving the relation between most significant parameters and the prediction response of liquefaction. The proposed probable liquefaction criterion was verified successfully by DOE technic. The proposed criterion comprised the index properties of fine grained soil as the most significant parameters for prediction of liquefaction. The determination of these properties in the laboratory can be carried out by very simple laboratory procedures. Hence the proposed criterion may be considered as the effective and accurate yet simplest method for assessing the liquefaction of sand with fines.