Probabilistic Assessment of Ultimate Pseudo-Static Design of Gravity Quay Walls Respect to Uncertain Soil Parameters

The downtime of the quay walls due to natural disasters results in severe economic loss. Due to hazards threatening such inexperience, important nodes of national and international transportation networks, seismic design of quay wallsis still an evolving issue on marine-civil engineering. This study investigates sensitivity of the stability of the gravitytypequay wall to uncertain soil properties in ultimate limit sate pseudo-static design process. Stability of the structure isdefined by means of safety factor against failures due to sliding (sfs), overturning (sfo) and bearing capacity (sfb). Inorder to assess the forces exerting on quay walls, to be more accurate, water pore pressure, horizontal and vertical inertia forces, fluctuating and non-fluctuating components of hydraulic and soil pressure are considered. Results caused by increase of specific weight of the rubble mound, back-fill and foundation gravel, friction angle for wall foundationseabed interface and wall back face-backfill interface and friction angle of backfill soil, lead safety factors to magnify.Utilizing the tornado diagrams, sensitivity analysis is preformed. Authors believe that results of this study would give designers some insights about the importance of uncertain soil factors in order to decide choosing geometry of thedesign in a way that its analysis is less relied on severely uncertain parameters

Keywords:

Quay wall , seismic design , uncertainty , ultimate limit-state , safety factor , stability