Abstract

The Marmaray Rail Tube Tunnel and Commuter Rail Mass Transit System Project provides an upgrading of the commuter rail system in Istanbul connecting Halkali on the European side with Gebze on the Asian side with an uninterrupted, modern, high-capacity commuter rail system. Railway tracks in both sides of Istanbul Strait will be connected to each other through a railway tunnel connection under the Istanbul Strait. The line goes underground at Yedikule, continues through the Yenikapi and Sirkeci new underground stations, passes under the Istanbul Strait, connects to the Üsküdar new underground station and emerges at Sögütlüçesme. This project is one of the major transportation infrastructure projects in the world at present. The entire upgraded and new railway system will be approximately 76 km long.  In this study, by using CPT data and acceleration and magnitude data (obtained seismic hazard analysis of Marmara Region), settlement analysis were carried out for Marmaray Project. As it is known, liquefaction is a soil behavior of saturated sandy soils under the earthquake/dynamic effects. In the first phase of the study, ‘cyclic stress ratio approach’ was applied to all data to analysis of soil liquefaction. In the second phase of the study, by using Isihara and Yoshimine (1992) approach, possible soil settlements for several design earthquakes (for several acceleration and magnitude values) were estimated.

Key words: Liquefaction, induced settlements, marmaray project.