• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.261-271
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• 2016

In the prediction of response of a pile in soil, numerical approaches such as a finite element method are generally applied due to complicate nonlinear behaviors of soils. However, the numerical methods based on the finite elements require heavy efforts in pile and soil modelling and also take long computing time. So their usage is limited especially in the early design stage in which principal dimensions and properties are not specified and tend to vary. On the contrary, theoretical approaches adopting linear approximations for soils are relatively simple and easy to model and take short computing time. Therefore, if they are validated to be reliable, they would be applicable in predicting responses of a pile in soil, particularly in early design stage. In case of wind turbines regarded in this study, it is required to assess their natural frequencies in early stages, and in this simulation the supporting pile inserted in soil could be replaced with a simplified elastic boundary condition at the bottom end of the wind turbine tower. To do this, analysis for a pile in soil is performed in this study to extract the spring constants at the top end of the pile. The pile in soil can be modelled as a beam on elastic spring by assuming that the soils deform within an elastic range. In this study, it is attempted to predict pile deformations and influence factors for lateral loads by means of the beam-on-spring model. As two example supporting structures for wind turbines, mono pile and suction pile models with different diameters are examined by evaluating their influence factors and validated by comparing them with those reported in literature. In addition, the deflection profiles along the depth and spring constants at the top end of the piles are compared to assess their supporting features.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.26 no.7
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• pp.49-58
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• 2010

This paper presents experimental results of a series of 1-g shaking table model tests performed on end-bearing single piles and pile groups to investigate the effect of particle size on the dynamic behavior of soil-pile systems. Two soil-pile models were tested twice: first using Jumoonjin sand, and second using Australian Fine sand. In the case of single-pile models, the lateral displacement was almost within 1% of pile diameter which corresponds to the elastic range of the pile. The back-calculated p-y curves show that the subgrade reaction of the Jumoonjin-sand-model ground was larger than that of the Australian Fine-sand-model ground at the same displacement. This phenomenon means that the stress-strain behavior of Jumoonjin sand was initially stiffer than that of Australian Fine sand. This difference was also confirmed by resonant column tests and compression triaxial tests. And the single pile p-y backbone curves of the Australian fine sand were constructed and compared with those of the Jumoonjin sand. As a result, the stiffness of the p-y backbone curves of Jumunjin sand was larger than those of Australian fine sand. Therefore, using the same p-y curves regardless of particle size can lead to inaccurate results when evaluating dynamic behavior of soil-pile system. In the case of the group-pile models, the lateral displacement was much larger than the elastic range of pile movement at the same test conditions in the single-pile models. The back-calculated p-y curves in the case of group pile models were very similar in both sands because the stiffness difference between the Jumoonjin-sand-model ground and the Australian Fine-sand-model ground was not significantly large at a large strain level, where both sands showed non-linear behavior. According to a series of single pile and group pile test results, the evaluation group pile effect using the p-multiplier can lead to inaccurate results on dynamic behavior of soil-pile system.