Performance of group of Screw Piles under combined axial and lateral load for offshore jacket structure

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Screw piles are typically made of steel and consist of a central shaft welded with one or more helices that are useful to screw the pile into the ground. These are traditionally used in onshore applications as guyed cable anchors to support the electric and transmission towers. Recently, screw piles are gaining popularity as a foundation for offshore structures that are subjected to a significant amount of combined axial and lateral loads. This paper presents the performance of a group of screw piles subjected to combined axial and lateral loading in cohesionless soil. A 3-D finite element analysis is carried out using the commercially available software, Abaqus (2018). The screw pile is considered to be wished-in-place. The soil is modeled using Mohr-Coulomb constitutive relations and the screw pile as a linearly elastic material model. This study examines the effect of number of helices (n), helix diameter (D_h/D_s), inter-helix spacing (s_h/D_h), and pile spacing (s_p/D_h) on the performance of screw piles under both vertical compression and lateral loads. Yield envelopes are developed for the group of screw piles subjected to combined V-H loading. The present study shows that the number of helices significantly increases the performance of the screw pile group compared to the plain shaft pile, resulting in larger yield envelopes. Overall, the 2-helix pile group shows higher capacity in all cases. Higher helix spacing results in higher capacity in the case of a 2-helix pile group, keeping the top helix position fixed. The present study demonstrates that screw pile groups exhibit exceptional performance under combined loading conditions, making them suitable for offshore jacket structures.

5th International Symposium on Frontiers in Offshore Geotechnics (ISFOG2025)

13 - Developmental foundation and anchoring concepts: hybrid foundations, ring anchors, helical piles, torpedo, shared anchoring