A hypoplastic macroelement formulation for single batter piles in sand

Zheng Li (1, 2, 3) , Panagiotis Kotronis (2) , Sandra Escoffier (3) , Claudio Tamagnini (4)

1 Beijing University of Technology
2 GeM - Institut de Recherche en Génie Civil et Mécanique
3 IFSTTAR/GERS/SV - Séismes et Vibrations
4 UNIPG - Università degli Studi di Perugia = University of Perugia

Batter piles are widely used in geotechnical engineering when substantial lateral resistance is needed or to avoid the interference with existing underground constructions. Nevertheless, there is a lack of fast numerical tools for nonlin-ear soil-structure interactions problems for this type of foundation. A novel hypoplastic macroelement is proposed, able to reproduce the nonlinear response of a single batter pile in sand under monotonic and cyclic static loadings. The behavior of batter piles (15°, 30°, and 45°) is first numerically investigated using 3D finite element modeling and compared with the behavior of vertical piles. It is shown that their response mainly depends on the pile inclination and the loading direction. Then, starting from the macroelement for single vertical piles in sand by Li et al (Acta Geotechnica, 11(2):373-390, 2016), an extension is proposed to take into account the pile inclination introducing simple analytical equations in the expression describing the failure surface. 3D finite element numerical models are adopted to validate the macroelement that is proven able to reproduce the nonlinear behavior in terms of global quantities (forces-displacements) and to significantly reduce the necessary computational time.

Mots clés: batter pile; hypoplasticity; macroelement; soil-structure interaction

Domaines: Matériaux

Zheng Li, Panagiotis Kotronis, Sandra Escoffier, Claudio Tamagnini. A hypoplastic macroelement formulation for single batter piles in sand. International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics, 2018, 42 (12), pp.1346-1365. ⟨10.1002/nag.2794⟩. ⟨hal-01853242⟩