Performance of laterally loaded piles considering soil and interface parameters

Abstract

To investigate the soil-pile interactive performance under lateral loads, a set of laboratory model tests was conducted on remoulded test bed of soft clay and medium dense sand. Then, a simplified boundary element analysis had been carried out assuming floating pile. In case of soft clay, it has been observed that lateral loads on piles can initiate the formation of a gap, soil heave and the tension crack in the vicinity of the soil surface and the interface, whereas in medium dense sand, a semi-elliptical depression zone can develop. Comparison of test and boundary element results indicates the accuracy of the solution developed. However, in the boundary element analysis, the possible shear stresses likely to be developed at the interface are ignored in order to simplify the existing complex equations. Moreover, it is unable to capture the influence of base restraint in case of a socketed pile. To bridge up this gap and to study the influence of the initial stress state and interface parameters, a field based case-study of laterally-loaded pile in layered soil with socketed tip is explored and modelled using the finite element method. The results of the model have been verified against known field measurements from a case-study. Parametric studies have been conducted to investigate the influence of the coefficient of lateral earth pressure and the interface strength reduction factor on the results of the model.

Performance of Laterally Loaded Model Finned Piles in Clay Soil

“…Tests were conducted on model piles embedded in soft clay in a cubic steel testing chamber with internal dimensions of (50cm) for both wide and length, and (70cm) as a depth and a thickness of (3mm) to prevent any lateral deformation on the tank's sides. It is noteworthy that in the present study the tank dimension was chosen to neglect the effect of both the scale effect and boundary conditions and minimize their effect on the test results [15].…”

Piles Subjected to Torsional Cyclic Load: Numerical Analysis

“…These include the dynamic response analysis, cyclic stability analysis, finite element and boundary element analysis etc. to name a few (Poulos, 1982(Poulos, , 1988Bea, 1992;Basack and Dey, 2012;Fatahi et al, 2014). In the present paper, a novel numerical methodology based on boundary element modeling (BEM) is proposed to capture the response of a single, vertical, floating pile subjected to combined axial, and torsional cyclic loads.…”

The Effect of Pile Cross Section on the Lateral behavior of Piles Under Combined Loading

“…Many previous works were taken into account the effect of only pure lateral load on the piles such as Bouafia 2007, Abbas et al 2008, Ozden and Akdag 2009, Rahman et al 2009, Fatahi et al 2014; Abdrabbo and El-Wakil 2016, Yan et al 2016 and others. While in fact, the pile was subjected to both axial and lateral loads at the same time, and this case should be taken into consideration in the analysis of lateral pile behavior.…”