Partial Safety Factors for Rubble Mound Breakwaters

On the basis of the failure modes formulated in the various subtasks calibration of partial safety factors are described in this paper. The partial safety factors can be used to design breakwaters under quite different design conditions, namely probabilities of failure from 0.01 to 0.4, design lifetimes from 20 to 100 years and different qualities of wave data. A code of practice where safety is taken into account using partial safety factors is called a level I code. The partial safety factors are calibrated using First Order Reliability Methods (FORM, see Madsen et al. [1]) where the reliability is measured by reliability indices. For all significant failure modes limit state functions are formulated and uncertain quantities are modelled by stochastic variables. In section 2 the most important failure modes are mentioned and statistical models for the uncertain parameters are described in section 3. First Order Reliability Methods are described in section 4, and in section 5 it is shown how partial safety factors can be introduced and calibrated. The format of a code for design and analysis of rubble mound breakwaters is discussed in section 6. The mathematical formulation of the limit state functions and design equations corresponding to the failure modes selected are given in section 7. Finally, section 8 contain calibrated partial safety factors for the different failure modes. The factors are presented in tables.