Reliability Analysis of Thaw‐Induced Pore Pressures

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for incorporating reliability analysis in the prediction of excess pore pressures caused by thawing of frozen soils. The proposed approach is a risk‐based procedure that can be used to develop measures of reliability of the predictions based on the framework of the one‐dimensional theory of thaw consolidation. A first‐order uncertainty analysis is used to estimate the first two moments of the predicted values of normalized excess pore pressure. These statistical parameters are subsequently used to estimate the probability distribution function of the predictions. The types of uncertainties considered in this paper include parameter and model uncertainties. The validity of the first‐order analysis is checked by performing Monte Carlo simulations and comparing the approximate distribution functions. The proposed method is illustrated by numerical experiments with different input conditions and an example application for a realistic design situation.