Reliability of scour protections with copula-based models

Abstract

Scour protections are commonly designed according to semi-empiric methodologies, which are based on a deterministic approach. This often results in overestimated dimensions of the protection, namely, regarding the required minimum stone size for offshore engineering. Therefore, excessive costs of the protection are expected, when the deterministic design methodology is used. Moreover, these methodologies do not provide a measure of safety associated to the design of the scour protection. In this paper, one uses copulas theory to model the correlated long-term behaviour of the significant wave height and peak period. The statistical models are then used to address the probability of failure of a case study scour protection. The results show that the copula models influence the safety assessment of the scour protection. The research also includes a brief analysis of physical model tests, which were successfully used to define dynamically and statically stable scour protections for the case study analysed.