2014 Volume 9 Issue 4 Pages 603-618
Liquefaction potential at a site is currently evaluated by a Stress-Based Method (SBM) or FL-Method in almost all engineering practice. An Energy-Based Method (EBM) focusing on dissipated energy as physical quantity controlling liquefaction behavior was already proposed, but is not used in engineering practice. In this paper, Energy-Based Method proposed in a previous paper is applied to a uniform sand model, and evaluates liquefaction potential by different seismic motions to compare with FL-Method. Two evaluation results tend to be consistent with each other in many cases, though in a uniform sand deposit liquefaction always starts from shallow depth in EBM while it depends on dominant period of motions in SBM. Also shown is that EBM intrinsically reflects the effect such as durations and dominant periods in seismic motions without depending on parameters such as the stress reduction coefficient. Then actual liquefaction cases in Urayasu during Tohoku earthquake and in Tanno-cho during Tokachioki earthquake are studied by the two methods and the results are compared to know the applicability of EBM in comparison of SBM.
