Ductility of open piled wharves under reversed cyclinc loads

Ductility of open piled wharves under reversed cyclic loads has been investigated.<br />Experimental testing of five wharf models having a scale of about 1:4 was conducted under the<br />application of horizontal reversed cyclic loading. The experiments were designed to focus on the<br />horizontal ultimate load, ductility and failure mode of the considered wharf models. Nonlinear numerical<br />analyses using the finite element method were also performed on numerical models representing the<br />experimentally tested wharves. The results of the experimental tests showed that open piled wharves<br />possessed favourable ductile behaviour and that their load bearing capacity did not depreciate until a<br />ductility factor of 3 to 4 was reached. The numerical analysis showed that the relative rotation that took<br />place at the joints between the steel piles and the R.C. beam was responsible for a considerable portion of<br />the total horizontal deformation of the wharves. Therefore, it was concluded that introducing the joint<br />stiffness in calculating the deformations of open piled wharves was important to achieve reasonable<br />accuracy.