Assessment of Liquefaction Potential of Barhadashi Municipality, Jhapa District, Nepal

Abstract

This paper evaluates the liquefaction potential of Barhadashi which is a small rural municipality of Jhapa district, Nepal. Mogami and Kubo (1953) first coined the term liquefaction. This paper follows R.W. Boulanger & I.M. Idriss (2014) which is SPT and CPT based procedures. Liquefaction occurs in saturated soils or partially saturated soils during earthquake or when it is subjected to stresses such as ground motion like underground mining, transportation, nuclear detonation, heavy machine vibration and so on. Major factors that affect the liquefaction are unit weight of soil, penetration test values, depth of water table, percentage of fines content and peak ground acceleration. Some of these factors have influence on each other and change in one factor brings the change in other factors too. Considering the sparsely populated and small area of Barhadashi three boreholes were drilled to obtain the SPT-N value and soil sample for laboratory testing. This paper analyses liquefaction for earthquake of magnitude 8.0 and compares CRR8.0 with CRR6.0. Liquefaction susceptibility and potential were determined at all three sites and it was found all three sites were susceptible to liquefaction up to depth 6.0m for earthquake of magnitude of 8.0.