Numerical Modeling of Interface Between Soil and Pile to Account for Loss of Contact during Seismic Excitation

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology to understand the interface behavior of soil and pile under transient loading. Previous works by Trochanis (1991), Bently and Naggar (2000) and others gave an insight to the problem. But this paper illustrates the research methodology developed to understand the dynamic behavior of pile and soil by taking the soil yielding effects and also the interface effects. A detailed parametric study has been done to understand the behavior of the same by varying the length of the pile for various soil conditions. For the purpose of comparison, soil model size was taken as 15m x 10m x 11m with pile cross section as 0.5 X 0.5 m and length of pile as 10m. For this we have developed a program for modeling the soil pile structure interaction using three dimensional Finite Element Method in MATLAB R2009a, the details of the same have been given in this paper along with the validity of it with benchmark problems in the literature.