| Background Loose sand and silt that is saturated with water can behave like a liquid when shaken by an earthquake. (Seed and Idriss 1971). Soil liquefaction describes a phenomenon whereby a saturated or partially saturated soil substantially loses strength and stiffness in response to an applied stress, usually earthquake shaking or other sudden change in stress condition, causing it to behave like a liquid. (Kutanaei and Choobbasti 2015). On the basis of both the field and laboratory types of soil behavior observations, attempts are made to identifying the best methods for evaluating the liquefaction potential of a particular soil. In the literature, several simplified methods can be found, which are useful in assessing the nonlinear liquefaction potential of soil (Zhang and Goh 2016). Various procedures, known as conventional methods, have been developed by utilizing case studies and undisturbed soil samples (Rokni et al. 2017; Youd et al. 2001). An important aspect of geotechnical engineering is the estimation of liquefaction. There are several approaches for determining of soil liquefaction. The cost of collecting high quality undisturbed samples is considerably high and the laboratory conditions cannot simulate the actual conditions of the field; therefore, methods based on in-situ tests, such as the Standard Penetration Test (SPT), the Cone Penetration Test (CPT) and the Shear-wave Velocity Test (Vs), are applied by geotechnical engineers to estimate the soil liquefaction. Civil engineers usually make use of a factor of safety (FS) to evaluate the safety of a structure (Bolton Seed et al. 1985; Youd et al. 2001). The safety factor is defined as the strength of a member divided by the load applied to it. It is the requirement of most designed codes that the calculated safety factor of a member should be greater than a specified safety factor, a value at least larger than one, in order to ensure the safety of the designed structure. Since the specified safety factor is largely determined by experience; hence, there is no rational way of determining such a factor. Since the safety factorbased design method does not account for the variability of the member strength or the applied loading, the probability of failing structures cannot be known. Simplified procedures, originally proposed by Seed (Seed and Idriss 1971), which involved the standard penetration test (SPT) (Toshio Iwasaki 1986), are frequently used in evaluating the liquefaction potential of soils. |
