The Seismic Interaction of Rubble Mound Breakwater and Pile in Numerical Approach

Application of breakwaters in coastal protection in oil refinery ports can result in possible intersections between pipelines and protective breakwaters which will lead to some uncertainties about the seismic interaction in such complexes. An example is observed in the ongoing project of Nik Qeshm oil refinery port at Qeshm and failure in this system would lead to catastrophic financial and ecological losses. Site investigations showed that there are four different layering patterns beneath the breakwater which mostly contain silty sand and silty clay. In this study, fully nonlinear analyses were performed by FLAC finite difference program to evaluate the effect of several parameters such as pile geometry and nature of bed layering under the various seismic loadings on the seismic induced deformations of the mentioned rubble-mound breakwater. Results showed that the breakwater-pile interaction will not necessarily lead to improvement in seismic behavior of breakwater. The Finn constitutive model has been employed in the analyses due to its ability in computing generated excessive pore water pressure.