Seismic Performance of Gravity Quay Walls in Unimproved and in Improved Soils

Recently strong earthquakes around the world caused serious disasters for port structures. It shows the shortcoming of current design and construction procedures and the needs to develop the performance based guidelines for seismic design. The performance-based seismic design method has taken in the seismic design standards of buildings and bridges. However, port structures still use working stress design method. There are lots of improvements needed to be done to upgrade the current design codes. The objective of this research is directed towards numerically investigating the seismic behaviour of gravity quay walls/ soil system. For this purpose, 2D nonlinear dynamic analyses of soil–structure system are carried out with the aid of finite difference software, FLAC. The investigation has been also examined the effectiveness of ground improvement techniques in controlling permanent seismicallyinduced deformations to provide guidelines for remediation optimization. Based on the results, design considerations have been provided.