Driving behavior of stepped and tapered offshore piles due to hammer blows

Abstract

In this article, the drivability of stepped and tapered offshore piles with the same length and volume has been investigated under hammer blows. To justify the obtained results from field testing and numerical methods, this pile driving procedure has been analyzed and discussed with wave propagation mechanism. It will be shown that tapered pile can be confidently idealized as a number of prismatic segments connected rigidly to each other. This is an interesting finding that fully tapered or stepped piles have a better performance in pile driving and enable users to apply simple one dimensional numerical analysis for simulating pile drivability.