Soil Liquefaction: From mechanisms to effects on the built environment

The analysis of soil liquefaction phenomenon and its consequences on built environment remains one of the more active research areas in geotechnical engineering around the world. In many major earthquakes, liquefaction induced ground failures (sand boils, ground settlements, cracks and lateral spreading, flow failure) caused extensive damages to shallow-founded buildings and other engineering facilities. An accurate liquefaction hazard analysis can be done if all factors governing the liquefaction triggering and its effects are included, in a consistent way, into the assessment procedure. Given the complexity of the phenomenon itself and the variety of ground failure mechanisms, the evaluation of liquefaction hazard at large scale is necessarily done by means of simplified procedures that in some major earthquakes gave a misprediction of liquefaction effects on the built environment, highlighting the limits of their predictive capability. The development of more accurate methods to quantify liquefaction hazard and the associated consequences for buildings and infrastructures is the challenge on which the research is ongoing.