Fully and partially toe-restrained piles subjected to ground motion excitation

Abstract A finite layer method for seismic analysis of piles embedded in layered soil deposits is proposed. The pile ends (head and toe) may be fully or partially constrained against rotation and the shear deformation contribution to the lateral pile response is implicitly considered. These are significant improvements with respect to the simplified methods based on the one-dimensional, beam-on-elastic-foundation theory widely used in practice. A parametric analysis for different soil–pile systems subjected to vertically propagating shear waves is performed, and some considerations on the influence of the pile slenderness ratio, the soil–pile stiffness contrast, the fixity conditions at the pile ends and the characteristics of the soil deposit are made.