Analytic method of skin friction for plum blossom pile foundations considering pile-soil interaction under vertical load

Abstract

Plum blossom pile is a new type of special-shaped pile, which is proposed based on the principle of maximum perimeter with the same cross-sectional area. To advance this technique, primarily for the design of plum blossom piles, it is important to investigate the skin friction behavior of plum blossom pile foundations precluding any straightforward constitutive model. In this work, an analytic method dependent on the cross-sectional geometry and the vertical shearing effects is proposed by means of equilibrium analysis to calculate the effective vertical stress in the surrounding soil, the skin friction/negative skin friction, and the axial force/dragload of a plum blossom pile. Additionally, the curves of skin friction of piles are investigated with the same conditions. The results show that the curves of skin friction of piles deduced according to the developed analytic method agree well with the FEM results and related literature solution, which validates the solution. The axial force of the pile decreases with the increase of the shear action coefficient in the buried depth direction under the vertical concentrated load when considering the vertical shearing effects on the pile-soil interfaces.

Keywords

plum blossom pile / skin friction / pile-soil interaction / vertical shearing effects / negative skin friction

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Central South University