Ductility of open piled wharves under reversed cyclinc loads

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