Experimental Study on Laterally Loaded Piles in Multilayered Cohesionless Soil at 4D Pile

Abstract

Pile foundations are the most popular form of deep foundations used or both onshore and offshore structures. With the rapid growth of metropolitan areas and fast industrialization resulting from the fast-paced economic globalization, requirement of construction of heavier and taller structures on marginal site has become inevitable. This paper presents the results of analysis of laterally loaded stainless steel pipe piles embedded in multilayered cohesionless soil. An experimental investigation on model piles had been carried out using stainless steel pipe pile with outer diameter of 24mm and inner diameter of 20mm with different slenderness ratio of 25, 30 and 38 in a multilayered cohesionless soil. In first case, a loose layer is maintained between the dense layers with H/d ratio of 0.50 and in second case, only dense cohesionless soil layer of H/d ratio 0.0 is maintained with the depth of 0.0m. Where, H is the depth of middle cohesionless soil layer and d is the embedment depth of pile of different slenderness (L/d) ratio of 25, 30 and 38 at 4D pile spacing. The experimental results of first case and second case show that the lateral load–lateral displacement response depends on the slenderness ratio of the piles. The experimental program was further verified by a two-dimensional finite-element technique. The experimental results were compared with numerical analysis and are in a close agreement