A novel soil-pile interaction model for vertical pile settlement prediction

Abstract In the past decades, many continuum-mechanics-based soil-pile interaction models have been proposed for static or dynamic loading problems. However, considering the difficulty to solve the nonlinear continuum mechanics problem analytically, most of them are applied to study the linear elastic problems. Therefore, Load Transfer Functions whose coefficients are generally concluded from the experimental results are alternatively used in the nonlinear behavior studies. In this paper, a coupled soil-pile interaction model is proposed to predict the pile head settlement. The model is established under ideal elastoplastic assumption and unifies the computation of end bearing and floating piles without involving any parameters with ambiguous physical meanings. The reliability of the present solution is verified through the comparisons with in-field results. At last, a detailed parametric study is given to exhibit the development of skin friction around the pile shaft. And, the potential penetration failure is alerted for end-bearing piles with large Young's modulus.