Behavior of Lateral Resistance of Flexible Piles in Layered Soils

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental investigation on the lateral load carrying capacity of model piles of different flexural stiffness embedded in loose sand between dense sand and dense sand between loose sand layered soil strata. Attempts has been made to study the variation of lateral stiffness, eccentricity and soil layer thickness ratio and the effect of various parameters on the magnitude of Nh. The result of a model tested for the piles embedded in IS grade-II dry Ennore sand under monotonic lateral loadings. Experimental results are used for the load-deflection curves (p-y curves) for laterally loaded piles. The proposed p-y curves were compared to the existing curves with Nh and were evaluated with the experimental data. The ultimate lateral soil resistance and subgrade modulus were investigated and discussed. 0 for dense condition. The tests were conducted in two steps. a) The soil condition is loose sand layer between dense sand layer with H/D ratio of 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, and 0.90. b) The soil condition is dense sand layer between loose sand layer with H/D ratio of 0.25, 0.50, 0.75,and 0.90, where H is the thickness of middle layer and D is the total depth of embedment of the pile(=300mm). In both the cases the eccentricities of 0, 50, 100, 150 and 200mm are conducted in homogeneous loose sand layer and dense sand layer. The outside diameters of the piles are 16mm for solid Steel and Wooden Piles. Hollow Aluminium pile with 16mm outside and 0.3mm thickness. The embedment depths of all the piles are 300mm. The flexural rigidity of steel, wooden and Aluminium piles were 642.106Nm 2 , 506.12Nm 2 and 51.041Nm 2 respectively. The relative stiffness factors for steel, wooden and Aluminium were 0.1192, 0.939 and 0.0094 respectively for Loose sand layer and 0.0263, 0.0207 and 0.0020 for Dense sand layer. The horizontal displacement and rotation of pile cap are recorded by L.V.D.T. and two dial gauges. The stabilized 'Rainfall-Technique' this standard technique is available in standard literature and this technique was used to pour the sand in the testing steel tank. Figure.1 shows schematic sketch of experimental setup.