The Role of Soil Structure Interaction in Jeopardising Their Operability
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The latest advances in port and maritime industry have redefined the role of harbor facilities as a benchmark for the national economy. However, the latter mainly depend on aged quay walls built according to obsolete seismic codes. Provisions regarding the seismic performance of very sensitive components of container terminals such as cranes are rather limited, although several seismic design guidelines exist for port structures. Cranes are quite vulnerable to differential displacement of their supports, yet they are typically designed as rigid frames with little or no seismic detailing neglecting their potential interplay with quay-walls during earthquake shaking. This paper presents a parametric study involving nonlinear FE numerical analyses of the entire soil-wall-crane interacting system. It is shown that although the inertial response of the wall is usually out-of-phase with the crane, the seaward displacement of the former may impose kinematically-induced loading on the crane legs producing distortion or even derailment. In terms of current quay-wall design practice, it is shown that replacing the crane with two constant vertical forces at the locations of its two legs is not always a conservative approach.