Laboratory Component of Next-Generation Liquefaction Project Database

Soil liquefaction and resulting ground failure due to earthquakes presents a significant hazard to distributed infrastructure systems and structures around the world. Currently there is no consensus in liquefaction susceptibility or triggering models. The disagreements between models is a result of incomplete datasets and parameter spaces for model development. The Next Generation Liquefaction (NGL) Project was created to provide a database for advancing liquefaction research and to develop models for the prediction of liquefaction and its effects, derived in part from that database in a transparent and peer-reviewed manner, that provide end users with a consensus approach to assess liquefaction potential within a probabilistic framework. An online relational database was created for organizing and storing case histories which is available at http://​nextgenerationli​quefaction.​org/​ (https://​www.​doi.​org/​10.​21222/​C2J040, [1]). The NGL field case history database was recently expanded to include the results of laboratory testing programs because such results can inform aspects of liquefaction models that are poorly constrained by case histories alone. Data are organized by a schema describing tables, fields, and relationships among the tables. The types of information available in the database are test-specific and include processed-data quantities such as stress and strain rather than raw data such as load and displacement. The database is replicated in DesignSafe-CI [2] where users can write queries in Python scripts within Jupyter notebooks to interact with the data.