A new semi-analytical approach for dynamic pile-soil interaction problem

Abstract

This paper proposes a new semi-analytical approach for the computation of the dynamic response of a pile embedded in a half-space when it is subjected to a vertical harmonic load applied at the pile head or to loading from an incident wave field. The proposed approach considers the soil as an elastic half-space medium. In order to capture all essential dynamic behaviour of the pile-soil interaction avoiding large computational efforts, the system is modelled using the substructuring method in which the displacements and forces in a set of uniformly distributed points along the pile shaft are compatibilized with another set of coupling points in the soil also uniformly distributed along the virtual interaction area between the pile and the soil. The paper aims to study the accuracy and computational efficiency of this approach in comparison with two other methodologies: a numerical approach based on axisymmetric finite elements and perfect-matched layers, and against the approximate analytical approach based on linear elasticity developed by Novak. These comparisons reveal that the dynamic response for driving-point, far-field or incident wave-field problems can be predicted with acceptable accuracy and computational efficiency when the number of interaction points in the system increases.