Numerical installation of OE piles in soft rocks within the GPFEM framework
Numerical installation of OE piles in soft rocks within the GPFEM framework
Pile installation in soft rocks, i.e. chalk, still poses significant design and construction challenges. Episodes of pile run and refusal, both detrimental for the offshore industry continue to occur. This is in part due to the mechanical behaviour of soft-rocks, that in dynamic hydro-mechanical (HM) coupled conditions, become very complicated because of the localised collapse/de-structuration of the initially intact rock. Herein, a constitutive model for soft rocks, calibrated on laboratory data, is implemented within the GPFEM framework and is used to simulate open-ended pile installation in an idealized, homogeneous chalk layer. To prevent mesh dependency during strain localization, a non-local integral regularization is adopted. The results appear to capture the trends observed in the field, such as pile capacity and radial stress profile, showcasing the ability of the GPFEM framework as an useful tool to aid the interpretation of field results and predicting pile capacity.
M. Previtali; Matteo Oryem Ciantia; Thomas Riccio
10th European Conference on Numerical Methods in Geotechnical Engineering (NUMGE2023)
12. Offshore geotechnics
https://doi.org/10.53243/NUMGE2023-322
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