Behavior of offshore pile in calcareous sand—Case study

Abstract

The erosion of limestone and calcarenite ridges that existed parallel to the Mediterranean shoreline forms the calcareous sand (CS) formation at the surface layer of Egypt's northern coast. The CS is often combined with broken shells which are considered geotechnically problematic due to their possible crushability and relatively high compressibility. In this research, CS samples collected from a site along the northern coast of Egypt are studied to better understand its behavior under normal and shear stresses. Reconstituted CS specimens with different ratios of broken shells (BS) are also investigated to study the effect of BS ratios on the soil mixture strength behavior. The strength is evaluated using laboratory direct-shear and one-dimensional compression tests (oedometer test). The CS specimens are not exposed to significant crushability even under relatively high-stress levels. In addition, a 3D finite element analysis (FEA) is presented in this paper to study the degradation offshore pile capacity in CS having different percentages of BS. The stress–strain results using oedometer tests are compared with a numerical model, and it gave identical matching for most cases. The effects of pile diameter and embedment depth parameters are then studied for the case study on the northern coast. Three different mixing ratios of CS and BS have been used, CS + 10% BS, CS + 30% BS, and CS + 50% BS, which resulted in a decrease of the ultimate vertical compression pile load capacity by 8.8%, 15%, and 16%, respectively.