Shake Table Tests on a Resilient Pile‐Supported Wharf With Damage‐Control Strategy

Recent strong earthquakes have severely damaged pile‐supported wharves, disrupting maritime trade and causing substantial economic losses. To enhance seismic resilience, this study presents a resilient pile‐supported wharf (RW) based on damage‐control design. In the RW, isolators are installed at the tops of vulnerable piles to decouple horizontal pile‐deck interaction. Within these pile‐deck decoupling zones, passive dampers dissipate energy and limit deck displacements under multi‐level performance objectives, ensuring rapid post‐earthquake recovery. A large‐scale (1:10) substructure shake table test was performed to compare the seismic responses of the RW to a conventional ductile wharf (CW) based on a batter‐pile wharf case. The proposed substructure testing method eliminates massive soil boxes, allows high PGA excitation of large‐scale wharf specimens, and accurately reproduces prototype seismic responses with errors within 30%. Experimental results show that the RW achieved a high‐resilience performance target (R3) under CLE and MCE earthquakes. Compared to the CW, the RW maintained comparable deck displacements and achieved up to a 73% reduction in deck accelerations. RW pile stresses remained elastic, concentrating energy dissipation within decoupling zones, whereas the CW experienced plastic deformation in batter piles, corresponding to a lower (R0) performance target.