Investigations into the Safety Level of Marine Steel Sheet Pile Structures with Consideration of Corrosion

In this paper, several reliability analyses of a sheet pile wall in a marine environment were performed, in which the influence of a wide range of corrosion models was assessed. The influence of the corrosion was compared in structures with different conditions (two different sheet pile profiles were used, as well as two values of the sheet pile length and also two different values of the surcharge). To perform the reliability analyses, the First Order Reliability Method (FORM) was used and reliability analyses were performed using a combination of different programs. The effect that the variation of the coefficient of variation v of the probability distributions has on the measured level of safety is not linear. For certain ranges of v, the influence on the safety level is not very significant, whereas in other ranges it causes an abrupt reduction of the safety, meaning that access to data of thickness loss due to corrosion of good quality (that represent reality as accurately as possible) is very important to avoid erroneous conclusions about the safety.