Abstract:
Capturing and understanding the ultimate limit state behaviour of reinforced concrete piles
embedded in soil requires the use of advanced tools or the performance of expensive tests. An
experiment was performed where reinforced concrete piles embedded in a stiff unsaturated
clay profile were load-tested on-site. However, even though in-situ experiments can provide
engineers with valuable insight, their cost and time limitations come with restrictions, especially
when dealing with a parametric investigation on the soil’s material properties, the size of the
piles, or the piles’ material properties. The objective of this research work was to numerically
model the nonlinear mechanical behaviour of laterally loaded full-scale piles through detailed
3D modelling, and perform an in-depth parametric investigation to provide answers to
unknown factors that the actual physical experiment could not answer. Furthermore, this
work serves as a pilot project that will be used to pave the way in developing multiple soilstructure
interaction models that will be used to generate a dataset that helps the creation of
predictive models through machine learning algorithms. For the needs of this research work,
the reinforced concrete piles were discretised with 8-noded isoparametric hexahedral elements
that accounted for cracking through the smeared crack approach. Steel reinforcement bars and
stirrups were simulated as embedded rebar elements, while the soil domain was also discretised
through 8-noded hexahedral elements. Most of the required material properties assumed
during the nonlinear analyses were defined according to relevant laboratory experiments.
According to the numerical investigation, it was found that the proposed numerical model has
the ability to reproduce the experimental results with high accuracy, while providing in-depth
insight on the failure mechanisms for both the soil and reinforced concrete domains.
