Pile subjected to lateral load : Analytical hand calculation implemented by programming

Sammanfattning: The official recommendations in geotechnical engineering are according to Swedish practice to install inclined driven piles in order to resist external horizontal loads, which usually consist of windloads. These loads gets counteracted by utilizing the pile's axial load-bearing capacity, however when designing a foundation the use of inclined piles has proven to be problematic from a number of different perspectives. This has made both engineers as well as contractors long for a solution where the piles instead are allowed to be installed vertically, which could be made possible by utilizing the lateral bearing capacity of the pile which occurs in connection with lateral resistance during pile-soil interaction. The present day knowledge about such an engineering procedure in Sweden has proven to be limited and consists mainly of one governing document, namely report 101 published by the Commission on Pile Research. The aim of our study is to test and evaluate the method in report 101 based on a number of different load cases related to lateral load effects during pile-soil interaction. An analytical method reproduced from the Commission on Pile Research's report has been implemented with help of Mathcad, a computer software for reuse of mathematical calculations. Decisive parameters that distinguish the different load cases have included external load impact in pile head, mechanical strength properties of friction or cohesive soil, along with cross-sectional dimensions and reinforcement content of piles etc. The results differed significantly depending on the loadcase, a majority of the given answers were also perceived as unreliable and in a number of load cases the method also failed to obtain an analytical solution. Our conclusion is that it is doubtful whether the elastoplastic method presented in report 101 in the end in practice benefits the engineer tasked with designing, this stands in stark contrast to an increasing demand for easily accessible knowledge within its field.