Vertical seismic response of end-bearing piles in nearly-saturated soil

This paper presents a study on the effect of the degree of saturation of the foundation soil on the vertical seismic response of end-bearing piles subjected to P-waves. The research focuses on nearly-saturated soil, where the air phase is not continuous and air bubbles are dissolved in the pore water, thus can be treated as two-phase material. The response of the two-phase soil-pile system is quantified by means of a rigorous coupled hydromechanical model, which is based on Biot’s theory for poroelastic media and treats the air bubbles-pore water mixture as homogeneous fluid obeying Boyle’s law. Numerical results are used to illustrate the influence of the degree of saturation of the soil layer on the seismic strong motion transferred to the pile head i.e. the capacity of piles to filter seismic wave energy. This work bridges the gap between single-phase and two-phase saturated soil models, which predict profoundly different pile head displacements at incident wave frequencies of practical interest, and elucidates the mechanisms that lead to these differences.