ONE-DIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS OF LIQUEFACTION POTENTIAL: A CASE STUDY IN CHIANG RAI PROVINCE, NORTHERN THAILAND

Abstract

 Liquefaction was investigated after the 6.8 Mw earthquake on March 24, 2011 (Tarlay earthquake) in Chiang Rai Province, Northern Thailand. Several investigations including soil boring, SPT, and SASW tests were carried out and the results were used to perform one dimensional wave propagation analysis using finite element method. The maximum acceleration of 0.206 g recorded in Chiang Rai was used as the input motion. The input motion was applied at bottom of soil column to observe soil behavior under seismic loading. The result shows that liquefaction could occur at shallow depth (0 to 16.5 m), which is also followed by settlement (1.8 to 4 cm) due to compressibility of soil during earthquake. The analysis result indicates that there is no significant dissipated pore water pressure on liquefied layer. The longer duration of liquefaction is identified on layer (SP-SM), which have the low SPT values. Excess pore water pressure from bottom layer might also concentrate at this layer. The concentration of excess pore water pressure may trigger the duration of liquefaction up to 50 seconds. In addition, the excess pore water pressure ratio linked to impacted depth warns that the soils with excess pore water pressure in range of 0.9 to 1 are possible to get worse impact if a stronger earthquake attacks this area in the future.