Numerical evaluation of buckling in steel pipe piles during vibratory installation: Fid-Bau Portal

Numerical evaluation of buckling in steel pipe piles during vibratory installation

Bakroon, Montaser / Daryaei, Reza / Aubram, Daniel / Rackwitz, Frank

Abstract The buckling of steel pipe piles during installation is numerically studied. Generally, numerical simulation of installation processes is challenging due to large soil deformations. However, by using advanced numerical approaches like Multi-Material Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (MMALE), such difficulties are mitigated. The Mohr-Coulomb and an elastic-perfectly plastic material model is used for the soil and pile respectively. The pile buckling behavior is verified using analytical solutions. Furthermore, the model is validated by an experiment where a pipe pile is driven into sand using vibratory loading. Several case scenarios, including the effects of heterogeneity in the soil and three imperfection modes (ovality, out-of-straightness, flatness) on the pile buckling are investigated. The numerical model agrees well with the experimental measurements. As a conclusion, when buckling starts, the penetration rate of the pile decreases compared to the non-buckled pile since less energy is dedicated to pile penetration given that it is spent mainly on buckling.

Highlights • An advanced numerical method, MMALE, is used to study pile buckling during the installation process. • By use of an efficient soil-structure interaction scheme, some of the simplifications used in previous studies are omitted. • The effects of initial imperfections in the pile, and heterogeneities in the soil on early buckling are studied. • The driving energy is spent on other phenomena such as pile buckling and lateral displacement, resulting in less penetration. • The study points out the MMALE method as a cost-effective evaluation tool for the pile design considering complex conditions.