Serviceability analysis of piled foundations supporting tall structures

Pile foundations supporting tall structures, such as wind turbines, chimneys, silos, elevated water tanks or bridge piers, are subjected during their life span to remarkably eccentric loads. These may lead to significant rotations which, however, cannot exceed the limiting values corresponding to the safe operation of the structure. A physically motivated mathematical framework aimed at the prediction of the serviceability performance of such kind of structures is herein presented and discussed. Piles are idealized as uniaxial nonlinear elements characterized by two yielding loads, one in compression and one in uplift, while pile-to-pile interaction effects are modeled by means of superposition, through an approximate solution. The axial load–moment capacity of the pile group is preliminary determined from a recent closed form, exact solution based on upper and lower bound theorems, allowing the analysis to be performed under load control. The model is capable of accounting for the dependence of the moment–rotation response from the dead load of the structure and the ‘coupling effect’ between generalized loads and displacements. The prediction performance of the proposed calculation method is validated against both numerical and experimental benchmarks. Finally, a parametric study allowed to assess the importance of pile-to-pile interaction on the foundation response under eccentric loads.