A New Hyperbolic p-y Curve Model for Laterally Loaded Piles in Soft Clay

摘要

Pile foundations are used for jacket type offshore structures, which are subjected to large magnitudes of lateral loads due to ocean waves and winds. Use of non-linear p-y curves to represent the static soil resistance is the common approach for analyzing the response of laterally loaded piles. In this paper, a simple and improved method for the construction of hyperbolic p-y curves for a soft clay is proposed for static loading conditions. The initial stiffness of the p-y curve is taken to be increasing with depth which depends entirely on the soil properties. A long, flexible, unrestrained vertical pile in a soft clay is analysed in which an iterative analysis is employed with the secant modulus approach, using the moment area method developed by Sawant et al. (1996). The analysis is performed using the p-y curves developed by Matlock (1970), Georgiadis et al. (1992) and the proposed hyperbolic p-y curves. The results are compared with the field test data reported by Matlock (1970).