Limit lateral resistance of vertical piles in plane strain

What is it about?

Plane-strain finite element analyses are performed for the determination of the limit lateral resistance that piles can exert to purely frictional and cohesive – frictional soils that flow around them. The soil is assumed to be an elastic – perfectly plastic material following the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion. Analyses are performed for a single pile, assuming no interaction with any neighboring piles. The FE results reveal that the limit pile lateral resistance is directly proportional to the initial horizontal effective stress and the tangent of the friction angle. Moreover, the pile resistance can be estimated by simple superposition of the contributions of the cohesion and the friction angle. Based on the numerical results, a simple equation is proposed for the estimation of the pile lateral resistance in non-dilative soils.

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