1st Ishihara Lecture: An overview of the behavior of pile foundations in liquefiable and non-liquefiable soils during earthquake excitation

Abstract

The seismic response of a pile foundation is usually analyzed by approximate methods in practice. These methods typically neglect one or more of the important factors that affect seismic response such as inertial interaction, kinematic interaction, seismic pore water pressures, soil nonlinearity, cross stiffness coupling and dynamic pile to pile interaction. A nonlinear 3-D analysis is used to show how all these factors affect pile response, to demonstrate some of the consequences of using various approximate methods and to provide a comprehensive overview of how pile foundations behave during earthquakes in liquefiable and non-liquefiable soils.