Response of Piles with Wings to Monotonic and Cyclic Lateral Loading in Sand
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 138, Issue 3
Abstract
Piles are required to withstand large lateral loads compared with the imposed vertical loads in certain applications in the offshore environment, such as for foundations for offshore wind turbines or as anchors for floating facilities. Although typically the soil strength increases with depth, close to the sea bed, the lateral capacity is often low. The requirement to limit pile head deflections necessitates the design of relatively long piles. Increasing the effective pile cross-section through “wings” close to the pile head is shown here with centrifuge model tests to reduce pile head deflections by approximately 50% compared with regular monopiles without “wings” for the same load level. The stiffer initial response of the winged pile also leads to smaller pile head deflections under cyclic loading, although the relative rate of accumulation is similar to that of a monopile. Simple methods for extrapolating from the monotonic pile head deflection to the deflection after thousands of cycles are compared with the results, and are shown to work equally well for piles with and without “wings”.
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Acknowledgments
The collaboration was supported by the Go8-DAAD Germany research collaboration scheme in 2009. The work described here forms part of the activities of the Centre for Offshore Foundation systems (COFS), established under the Australian Research Council’s Research Centres Program and now supported by Centre of Excellence funding from the State Government of Western Australia. The initial investigations on laterally loaded piles with wings performed at the Hamburg Univ. of Technology were supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The authors acknowledge the contribution of Don Herley, who assisted with the centrifuge experiments, David Jones for the manufacture of the models, and Shane De Catania, who developed the control software used in the centrifuge tests.
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 138 • Issue 3 • March 2012
Pages: 364 - 375
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 21, 2010
Accepted: Jun 23, 2011
Published online: Jun 25, 2011
Published in print: Mar 1, 2012
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