Performance-Based Reliability Analysis of Laterally Loaded Drilled Shafts

摘要

Analysis of laterally loaded piles or drilled shafts is a complex soil-structure interaction problem for which the p-y method has been widely accepted as a computational tool for predicting the load-displacement behavior. This paper presents a sampling-based method that can be applied to reliability analysis of the load-deflection behavior for laterally loaded piles. Various sources of uncertainties arising from soil properties, analysis model, and p-y criteria can be taken into account in the proposed method. In particular, soil properties needed as input for determining site-specific p-y curves were modeled as random fields. To statistically characterize the random field of a soil parameter, the field mean, the field variance, and the correlation structure are required. The performance of a pile under lateral loading is evaluated using a different set of random samples in each realization. The probability of failure, in which failure is defined as the event of not meeting the prescribed performance criteria, is calculated as the number of failures divided by the total number of samples. A numerical example is presented at the end of paper to demonstrate practical applications of the developed sampling-based method.