ABSTRACT
Despite the large number of applications and high costs involved in the construction of sheet pile bulkheads for harbour facilities, a comprehensive monitoring of the structure behaviour is often lacking, which limits the possibilities to increase our knowledge on the behaviour of such important infrastructures, especially when difficult subsoil conditions are encountered, as is usually the case for harbour environments. On the other hand, the behaviour of a bulkhead for marine applications is often characterized by the simplicity of the boundary conditions, both in terms of the groundwater regime and of the problem geometry, typically plane, whereas most of the uncertainties for a soil-structure interaction analysis relate to the actual construction and loading histories.
