The influence of pile groups configuration on its stability in dry sand under lateral loads

This paper aims to investigate the effect of the arrangement of aluminum pipe piles closed from both ends on its response under lateral loads in terms of a lateral load and bending moment. Twenty - four model tests for laterally loaded aluminum pipe piles were investigated to study the effect of sand relative density, the ratio (S/D=3, 4 and 5) of spacing between pile in the group(s) / diameter of aluminum pipe pile (D), loading direction or piles configuration. It was found that the lateral resistance of the pipe piles loaded with a configuration of 2 × 1 is higher than that loaded in the direction of the configuration 1 × 2. Relative sand density has a significant effect on the lateral capacity of the pile group. The increase of the relative density caused increase load resistance but the bending moment increased. The effect of (S/D) is very obviously on the behavior of bending moment and the load resistance of piles models, bending moment increased as S/d increased as well as for load resistance.