Reliability Analysis of a Quay Wall Constructed on the Deep-Cement-Mixed Ground (Part II: Internal Stability of the Improved Soil System)

This is the first of the two papers dealing with reliability analyses for external and internal stability of a quay wall constructed on a special foundation. A new practical reliability analysis method is proposed in this paper to evaluate the quantitative risk associated with external stability of a quay wall constructed on the deep cement mixed ground. The method can consider uncertainties in various design variables. For the risk estimation to external stability of the improved soil-quay wall, three corresponding limit state functions of sliding, overturning and bearing capacity are fully defined by introducing concept of the secondary random variable. Three representative reliability methods, MVFOSM, FORM and MCS are then applied to evaluate the failure probabilities of the three limit state functions explicitly expressed in terms of the basic and secondary random variables. From the reliability analysis results, the failure probabilities obtained from the three approaches are very close to each other, and the sliding failure mode appears to be the most critical when the earthquake loading is under consideration.