Behavior of Laterally Loaded Piles: I-Single Piles

TLDR

The study analyzes horizontal displacement and rotation of a vertical pile under lateral load and moment in an ideal elastic medium. The authors examine influence factors across pile flexibilities and length‑to‑diameter ratios for free‑head and fixed‑head piles, and extend the elastic model to include local soil‑pile yield, showing that yield markedly affects load‑displacement for flexible piles. Elastic solutions predict pile displacement and rotation more accurately than subgrade reaction theory, which overestimates these but estimates moments reasonably; local yield significantly alters load‑displacement for flexible piles, and the theoretical predictions agree well with full‑scale measurements.

Abstract

An analysis is presented for the horizontal displacement and rotation of a vertical pile subjected to lateral loading and moment, and situated in an ideal elastic mass. Influence factors are presented for a wide range of pile flexibilities and length-to-diameter ratios, for both free-head and fixed-head piles. Comparisons between the elastic solutions and the corresponding solutions obtained from the subgrade reaction theory show that the latter considerably overestimates the displacement and rotation of the pile, but gives a reasonable estimate of the moments in the pile. The elastic analysis is extended to include the effect of local yield between the soil and the pile; the load-displacement relationship for relatively flexible piles is found to be markedly influenced by local yield. The characteristics of behavior indicated by the theoretical solutions agree reasonably well with those reported from measurements on full-scale piles.