**Author details**

Vitaly Yurtaev1,2\* and Reza Shafiei1,2

\*Address all correspondence to: vitalijj@gmail.com

\*Address all correspondence to: vitalijj@hotmail.com

1 Moscow State University of Railways, Department Of Civil Engineering, (MIIT), Moscow, Russia

**Chapter 11**

**Numerical Modelling of the Seismic Behaviour of**

Gravity quay walls are the most common type of construction for docks and harbours because of their durability, ease of construction and capacity to reach deep seabed levels. Gravity quay walls are designed for three main criteria; sliding, overturning and allowable bearing stress under the base of quay wall. Although the design of gravity quay walls has been reasonably well understood for static loads, but analysis under seismic loads is still in being developed. During strong ground shaking, the pore water pressure of cohesionless saturated backfill soils builds up. This pressure increase not only causes the lateral forces on the wall (which leads to wall failure), but also reduces the effective stress of backfill soil which may result in liquefac‐ tion. The occurrence of liquefaction in backfill soil was the main reason of damages from past earthquakes to gravity quay walls (e.g., in 1964 at Nigata Port (Hayashi et al. 1966), in 1993 at Kushiro-oki, and in 1994 at Hokkaido Toho-oki (Sasajima et al. 2003)). Moreover, observations of 24 marine structures in 1999 earthquake at Kocaeli, Turkey showed the seaward movement of quay walls due to the liquefaction of backfill soils (Sumer et al. 2002). The same observations were reported in 1999 during the Chi Chi earthquake in Taiwan (Chen and Hwang 1999).

The seismic coefficient method containing Mononobe-Okabe's formula is usually used in the design of gravity-type quay walls to resist earthquake damages but this design method does not take into account the liquefaction of backfill soil and its associated deformations (Sasajima, et al. 2003). Furthermore, conventional design method of quay walls is based on providing capacity to resist a design seismic force, but it does not provide information on the performance of a structure when the limit of the force-balance is exceeded. In this regard, gravity quay walls failures have caused much progress in the development of deformation-based design methods for waterfront structures. Accordingly, much significant experimental and theoretical research works have been done (Sugano et al. 1996; Inagaki et al. 1996; Iai 1998; Iai et al. 1998; Iai and

> © 2013 Ebrahimian; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

> © 2013 Ebrahimian; licensee InTech. This is a chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,

© 2013 Ebrahimian; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**Gravity-Type Quay Walls**

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Babak Ebrahimian

**1. Introduction**

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/55027

2 Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA
