Dynamic response of laterally-loaded piles

The laterally-loaded pile has long been a topic of research interest. Several models of the soil surrounding a pile have been developed for simulation of lateral pile behavior, ranging from simple spring and dashpot models to sophisticated three-dimensional finite-element models. However, results from the available pile-soil models are not accurate due to inherent approximations or constraints. For the springs and dashpots representation, the real and imaginary stiffness are calculated by idealizing the soil domain as a series of plane-strain slices leading to unrealistic pile behavior at low frequencies while the three-dimensional finite-element analysis is very computationally demanding. Therefore, this dissertation research seeks to contribute toward procedures that are computationally cost-effective while accuracy of the computed response is maintained identical or close to that of the three-dimensional finite-element solution. Based on the fact that purely-elastic soil displacement variations in azimuthal direction are known, the surrounding soil can be formulated in terms of an equivalent one-dimensional model leading to a significant reduction of computational cost. The pile with conventional soil-slice model will be explored first. Next, models with shear stresses between soil slices, including and neglecting the soil vertical displacement, are investigated. Excellent agreement of results from the proposed models with three-dimensional finite-element solutions can be achieved with only small additional computational cost.