Updating piping probabilities with survived historical loads

Piping, also called under-seepage, is an internal erosion mechanism, which can cause the failure of dikes or other flood defence structures. The uncertainty in the resistance of a flood defence against piping is usually large, causing high probabilities of failure for this mechanism. A considerable part of this uncertainty is of epistemic nature...

Re-assessing reliability based on survived loads

The reliability of flood defenses is often dictated by large uncertainties in the hydraulic loading and the structural resistance. Additional information decreases uncertainty, however, acquiring it is often costly. One source of information, even though in many cases readily available, is hardly used – survived loads. This article shows how...

The Weakest Link: Spatial Variability in the Piping Failure Mechanism of Dikes

Piping is an important failure mechanism of flood defense structures. A dike fails due to piping when a head difference causes first the uplift of an inland blanket layer, and subsequently soil erosion due to a ground water flow. Spatial variability of subsoil parameters causes the probability of piping failure to increase, often to unacceptable...

Advances in reliability analysis of the piping failure mechanism of flood defences in the Netherlands

Piping is one of the main failure mechanisms for flood defences. This paper gives an overview of recent developments in the reliability analysis for this mechanism in the Netherlands. These comprise new approaches in the treatment of heterogeneity of the subsoil with respect to the failure process, the inclusion of information from field...

On reducing piping uncertainties: A Bayesian decision approach

Dikes and levees play a crucial role in flood protection in deltaic areas such as the Netherlands. Internal erosion piping or under-seepage is a major cause of levee failures and a main contributor to the probability of failure of river levees due to the large (mostly geotechnical) uncertainties. The present thesis investigates how geotechnical...

Reliability analysis of the Red River dikes system in Viet Nam

This dissertation presents the applications of probabilistic-based frameworks in geotechnical and hydraulic engineering, for the assessment of the Red River dikes in Viet Nam. Dike along rivers often spread over the deltaic environment and its earthen structures are parts of a long civilian history, from hundreds to thousands of years....