Investigation of Cyclic Loading of Aged Piles in Sand
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Volume 147, Issue 4
Abstract
In recent years, there has been a significant push to develop optimized pile designs in the offshore industry, driven by the growth of offshore wind. One of the largest remaining uncertainties governing axial pile design in sands is the influence of ageing effects and how an aged pile responds under axial cyclic loading. This paper presents results from a long-term campaign of field tests on pile ageing and axial cyclic loading in sands, undertaken at the Blessington geotechnical test site in Ireland. Five open-ended driven steel piles were subjected to a total of 33 static and cyclic tension pile load tests undertaken over a 3-year period. The tests were planned and coordinated in order to accurately quantify the effects of ageing and cyclic loading on the pile shaft capacity over time. The tests showed that significant gains in pile shaft capacity occurred over time as a result of pile ageing, in line with results presented by other researchers. Piles subjected to cyclic tension loading remained stable under cyclic loading at load levels much larger than their 1-day capacity. The 1-day capacity appears to offer a lower bound for the degraded pile capacity following tension cyclic loading to failure. The reduction in capacity caused by cyclic loading to failure was related to the pretest increase in capacity caused by ageing. The findings from these field tests in addition to reinterpretation of previous testing indicated that previously published cyclic interaction boundaries may be overly conservative.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to express their gratitude to Mainstream Renewable Power, the Irish Research Council for Science and Technology (IRCSET) and Enterprise Ireland (Grant No. IP/2010/0085), and Science Foundation Ireland (through Grant No.10-RFP-GEO2895) for cofinancing these field tests. The test piles were installed by Bullivan Tarranto, and pile testing was undertaken by Lloyd Acoustics Ltd. and UCD. The authors thank Roadstone Ltd. for permission to use the Redbog quarry at Blessington for the field tests. In-situ testing was performed by In-Situ SI Ltd., and thanks are due to the following research staff and students at UCD for assisting in the fieldwork: Dr. Lisa Kirwan and Mr. Tim Hennessey.
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Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 147 • Issue 4 • April 2021
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This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Received: Jun 19, 2019
Accepted: Sep 15, 2020
Published online: Feb 15, 2021
Published in print: Apr 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Jul 15, 2021
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