Earthquake-induced liquefaction potential and risk assessment of the world’s largest mobile manufacturing plant, Noida, Uttar Pradesh

Evaluating liquefaction potential is essential for seismic micro-zonation for a specific area. Ground improvement of a site is conducted after the examination of the propensity of liquefaction of that site. The present study aims to evaluate the liquefaction potential and risk assessment for the world’s largest mobile manufacturing Plant in Noida city, which comes under Gautam Buddha Nagar district (U.P.), India, for different magnitudes of earthquakes, i.e., 7.5, 7.0, and peak ground acceleration (\(a_{\max }\) = 0.24 g). For this purpose, the factor of safety against liquefaction was evaluated at different depths from 32 boreholes and soil samples based on stress based approach derived from Idriss and Boulanger (Soil Dyn Earthq Eng 26:115–130, 2006) and the liquefaction potential risk index of the particular site was evaluated further. The results show that the study area is mainly comprised of silt and sand and falls under site class D (as per IBC International Code Council (2006) International building code (IBC). Washington, DC). The middle part of the study area shows high liquefaction potential. From the following analysis, 3D liquefaction potential risk models are prepared for classifying the boreholes from “very low” to “very high” (Iwasaki et al. in Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on microzonation, Seattle, vol 3, no 2, pp 1310–1330, 1982) along their depth. This rapid approach can be helpful for the future construction of earthquake-resilient structures and it may also help determine the risk of current underground structures like buried pipelines and metro railways, which are critical lifeline infrastructures of a city.