Sheet Pile Combi-Wall Reinforcement Plates

The use of reinforcing plates welded to steel pile bulkhead walls to strengthen the piles is a technique that has been used for several decades. Reinforcing plates can be used to strengthen both steel sheet piles as well as pipe or H-section king piles in combi-walls. Although the use of such reinforcing plates to increase bulkhead wall capacity is similar to the use of flange or cover plates to strengthen bridge girders, there are certain nuances when it comes to marine bulkhead applications that make the situation subtlety different and for which little test or analysis data is available. As such, the authors studied a pipe pile/sheet pile combi-wall configuration and completed a finite element analysis (FEA) to demonstrate that welding plate-reinforcement to pipe king piles is an effective means of increasing the quay wall’s bending capacity in lieu of increasing the king pile’s diameter and/or wall thickness.