During the last years the Finite Element Method (FEM) is increasingly applied in the design of quay walls. Especially in case of quay walls with relieving floors and bulk-storage as surcharge load, sub-grade reaction models are limited in their accuracy of modelling the situation. The Finite Element Method often is the only option to more detailed design calculations of quay walls. In the recent years the introduction of Eurocode and the increasing use of Finite Element analysis for design calculations has triggered the update of the CUR Quay walls handbook CUR 211. The latter second edition has recently been published. In advance of this second edition it was decided to look into more detail into the combination of FEM analysis in combination with the Eurocode which lead to the study that is described in this article. In order to infer a more fundamental base for the design method with FEM, two quay walls were examined to check the applicability of the existing FEM design method of the Dutch Handbook Sheet Pile structures (CUR 166) on quay walls with relieving floor.
Furthermore, it was checked whether the current partial safety factors needed to be adapted. This research is done by performing probabilistic FEM calculations. The First Order Reliability Method is incorporated in the software Prob2B (Courage & Steenbergen, 2007) to perform the calculations. It appeared that using the design method of CUR 166 for quay walls with relieving floor leads to an underestimation of the reliability of the structure. Therefore it is advised to adapt the design method. Furthermore, differences in partial safety factors are proposed to reach the required reliability index.