Open AccessFACTORS OF SAFETY FOR THE DESIGN OF BREAKWATERS
Author(s) -
John Dorrington Mettam,
Jessica Berry
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
proceedings of conference on coastal engineering/proceedings of ... conference on coastal engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2156-1028
pISSN - 0589-087X
DOI - 10.9753/icce.v18.125
Subject(s) - breakwater , safety factor , stability (learning theory) , computer science , engineering , civil engineering , risk analysis (engineering) , marine engineering , geotechnical engineering , machine learning , medicine
This paper proposes to improve the safety of breakwaters by two important changes in the philosophy of design. When hydraulic model testing is used as a design tool the authors propose to reduce the specific gravity of the model breakwater to introduce a factor of safety in the prototype. They also recommend that the concept of testing for stability with the once in 50 year or once in 100 year wave should be replaced by a more rigorous statistical analysis to determine a design wave which has a probability of exceedence of no more than 5% in the lifetime of the structure.