Horizontal Response of Piles in Layered Soils

Abstract

An inexpensive and realistic procedure is developed for estimating the lateral dynamic stiffness and damping of flexible piles embedded in arbitrarily layered soil deposits. Starting point is the determination of the pile deflection profile for a static force at the top using any reasonable method—beam‐on‐Winkler foundation, finite elements, well‐instrumented pile load tests in the field, etc. Material as well as radiation damping due to waves emanating at different depths from the pile‐soil interface are rationally taken into account; the overall equivalent damping at the top of the pile is then obtained as a function of frequency by means of a suitable energy relationship. The method is applied to study the dynamic behavior of three different piles embedded in two idealized and one actual layered soil deposit; the results of the method, obtained by hand computations, compare favorably with the results of three dimensional dynamic finite element analyses.