Soil plug effect prediction and pile driveability analysis for large-diameter steel piles in ocean engineering

Long steel piles with large diameters have been more widely used in the field of ocean engineering. Owing to the pile with a large diameter, soil plug development during pile driving has great influences on pile driveability and bearing capacity. The response of soil plug developed inside the open-ended pipe pile during the dynamic condition of pile-driving is different from the response under the static condition of loading during service. This paper addresses the former aspect. A numerical procedure for soil plug effect prediction and pile driveability analysis is proposed and described. By taking into consideration of the pile dimension effect on side and tip resistance, this approach introduces a dimensional coefficient to the conventional static equilibrium equations for the plug differential unit and proposes an improved static equity method for the plug effect prediction. At the same time, this approach introduces a simplified model by use of one-dimensional stress wave equation to simulate the interaction between soil plug and pile inner wall. The proposed approach has been applied in practical engineering analyses. Results show that the calculated plug effect and pile driveability based on the proposed approach agree well with the observed data. ©2009 Chinese Ocean Engineering Society.