Effects of various factors on behaviors of piles and foundation soils due to seismic shaking

Abstract

Buckling instability has been identified as a possible mechanism of pile failure in liquefiable ground and this failure mechanism is not explicitly mentioned in most of the design codes. Pile buckling would be affected, however, by various factors including liquefaction zone of foundations soils, axial loads of piles, geometry as well as arrangement of pile foundation, etc. An efficient approach using deterministic by Bhattacharya is proposed to compute the buckling instability in pile. This method is verified and validated using 3D finite-element simulation through OpenSeesPL. A more comprehensive study of numerical simulation would include the effects of various factors on the responses of piles and foundations soils due to seismic loading. The findings reported that an increase in axial loading would generally increase the excess pore pressure in soils and would generally increase the deflection and bending moment in piles and acceleration responses in soils. An increase in pile spacing would generally increase the deflection and bending moment in piles, as a result of more soil volume among the piles. An increase in diameter of pile would increase in rigidity and maximum bending capacity of piles and thus would resist more energy released in liquefiable ground that amplifies the deflection (curvature) of pile. A comparison of two approaches confirms the pile would be safe from buckling failure against soil liquefaction during seismic loading. Finally, this study would provide for predicting pile buckling instability and the behaviors of piles and foundation soils due to seismic shaking and liquefied ground.