ABSTRACT
The major cause of earthquake damage to an embankment is the liquefaction of the soil foundation that induces ground level deformations. It is well known that the liquefaction appears when the soil loses its shear strength due to the excess of pore water pressure. The aim of this paper is to assess numerically the effect of the liquefaction-induced settlement of the soil foundation on an embankment due to real earthquakes. For this purpose, a 2D Finite Element (FE) model of a levee founded on a layered soil/rock profile was considered. An elastoplastic multi-mechanism model was used to represent the soil behaviour. The crest settlement of the embankment was selected as the quantifiable damage variable of the study. Fragility functions were drawn to give the probability exceedance of some proposed damage levels as function of a seismic severity parameter. However, FE analysis can be expensive due to very large number of simulations needed for an accurate assessment of the system failure behaviour. This problem is addressed by building a Gaussian Process (GP) emulator to represent the output of the expensive FE model. A comparison with the FE reference results suggests that the proposed GP model works well and can be successfully used as a predictive tool to compute the induced damage on the levee.
