Updating piping probabilities with survived historical loads

Abstract

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, which can be reduced by incorporating extra information. It is shown how the knowledge of historically survived water levels, the main load factor, can be integrated into the probability distribution of the piping resistance variables by means of Bayesian Updating. The effects are demonstrated by means of a realistic numerical example.Hydraulic EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience