Reliability assessment of pile-founded navigation structures

The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has designed pile-founded navigation structures to provide a consistently high level of safety and serviceability by using allowable values for pile stresses, pile load capacity, and deflections in structure design. Older in-service pile-founded navigation structures can be assessed using the same limit states used in the design of new pile-founded structures. This paper examines the reliability assessment of timber pile-founded navigation structures without the loss of support. The techniques developed to perform the reliability assessment employ a capacity/demand relationship for limit states of axial capacity, lateral deflections axial deflections, and combined bending. Monte Carlo simulations and first order second moment techniques were used to calibrate the limit states to instrumented pile load test data from field tests. A river dam monolith subjected to impact loading is discussed herein