Failure probability of marine steel sheet pile structures with special consideration of the corrosion impact

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 on its safety was assessed. The First Order Reliability Method (FORM) was used and the reliability analyses were performed using a combination of different programs. The effect that the variation of the coefficient of variation CoV of the probability distributions has on the measured level of safety is not linear. For certain ranges of CoV, the influence on the safety level is not very significant, whereas in other ranges it causes an abrupt reduction of the safety, meaning that the access to good quality data of thickness loss due to corrosion- is important to avoid erroneous conclusions about the safety. A design procedure to include the effect of corrosion in the safety of the structure was also developed.