Piles are often subjected to lateral load in case of both onshore and offshore structures due to wave, seismic and wind forces. Such dynamic forces, which come on piles through the structures, are made very often pseudo-static for convenience of analysis and design. Hence piles subjected to lateral load and embedded in layered soil need assessment of lateral load capacity for proper structural design. In this paper, an attempt has been made to study some aspects of behavior of laterally loaded piles and pile groups with the help of PLAXIS3D software. The analysis has been done for single piles and pile groups with various embedment ratios, stiffnesses of soil layers, length to diameter ratios and spacings of piles. A parametric study has been carried out in the present investigation with variation of these parameters. It was obtained that soil surrounding the pile within a depth of 10 times the pile diameter below the surface effectively contributes to the lateral resistance. The isolation spacing occurs at 3 times the pile diameter in which case the piles in a group start to behave as individual ones.
展开▼
