Analysis of Pile Penetration into Crushable Sand Using Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian Method

The high-stress level caused by the pile penetration can result in grain breakage of sand around the pile, which is more serious for the very easily crushable sand. The grain breakage will lead to the reduction of pile bearing capacity, which can result in the instability of foundation structures even collapse. In this paper, a numerical analysis to investigate the problem of pile penetrating into the foundation of crushable sand is performed by adopting a newly developed sand breakage model combing with Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) method. Then the centrifuge pile penetration tests performed on Dog’bay carbonate sand was simulated by using CEL technique. The simulated results have a good agreement with the experimental measurements, which demonstrated that this numerical analysis for solving the pile penetrating is effective and feasible. All the simulated results show that the cone resistance is significantly decreased due to the grain breakage. Finally, it indicates that the numerical analysis is helpful for the design and construction of pile penetrating into crushable sand.