Response of Flexible Piles Under Lateral Loads

Abstract

Soil pile interaction studies have evolved over the years and the contribution by various researchers in this field has lead to the development of various methods viz. modulus of subgrade reaction approach, elastic continuum approach and finite element techniques for estimating the pile response.The advantage of subgrade reaction approach over elastic continuum approach is that besides its simplicity, it can also account for material non-linearity. The more realistic approach is elastic continuum method, however, the pile response based on this method, depends on the accurate estimation of soil young’s modulus. In the present study modulus of subgrade reaction is related to young’s modulus of soil using empirical relations and pile response for various stiffness ratio’s is obtained by using both modulus of subgrade reaction approach and finite element based solutions for homogeneous soils, soils with linearly varying stiffness and for two layered soils with constant but different soil stiffness. With the pile response so obtained by both these methods, algebraic expressions have been proposed for pile head deflections and maximum pile bending moments for homogeneous soils, soils with linearly varying stiffness and for two layered soils with constant but different soil stiffness.