Enhanced analysis of pile flexural behavior due to installation of adjacent pile

Abstract

The installation of piles causes lateral soil movements which will induce additional lateral loading on adjacent existing piles. A simplified two-stage approach is conventionally adopted to quantify the installation effect on an adjacent pile. The first stage involves estimating the free-field lateral soil movement profile due to the pile installation process, and this is then applied as input to a pile-soil interaction analysis in the second stage. Such an approach is computationally efficient, but its efficacy has not been rigorously assessed due to the lack of reliable rigorous reference solutions. In this study, the Eulerian finite element approach is applied to obtain rigorous reference solutions for the response of an existing pile due to the installation of an adjacent pile. The efficacy of the two-stage approach is then evaluated against these reference solutions. It is found that the bending moment profiles generated using the simplified two-stage approach deviate significantly from the reference solutions. The shortcomings of the existing two-stage approach are identified, and an improved analysis method denoted as the Enhanced Multi-Stage Approach is proposed and validated in this paper. The results based on the Enhanced Multi-Stage Approach are found to be in good agreement with the more rigorous reference solutions.