Journal of Korea Water Resources Association ISSN:2799-8746(Print) 2799-8754(Online) 한국수자원학회 논문집

The stabilities of sliding and overturning of caisson and bearing capacity of mound against eccentric and inclined loads, which possibly happen to a composite caisson breakwaters, have been analyzed by using the technique of multiple failure modes. In deterministic approach, mathematical functions have been first derived from the ultimate limit state equations. Using those functions, the minimum cross section of caisson can straightforwardly be evaluated. By taking a look into some various deterministic analyses, it has been found that the conflict between failure modes can be occurred, such that the stability of bearing capacity of mound decreased as the stability of sliding increased. Therefore, the multiple failure modes for the composite caisson breakwaters should be taken into account simultaneously even in the process of deterministically evaluating the design cross section of caisson. Meanwhile, the reliability analyses on multiple failure modes have been implemented to the cross section determined by the sliding failure mode. It has been shown that the system failure probabilities of the composite breakwater are very behaved differently according to the variation of incident waves. The failure probabilities of system tend also to increase as the crest freeboards of caisson are heightening. The similar behaviors are taken place in cases that the water depths above mound are deepening. Finally, the results of the first-order modal are quite coincided with those of the second-order modal in all conditions of numerical tests performed in this paper. However, the second-order modal have had higher accuracy than the first-order modal. This is mainly due to that some correlations between failure modes can be properly incorporated in the second-order modal. Nevertheless, the first-order modal can also be easily used only when one of failure probabilities among multiple failure modes is extremely larger than others.