A Program For The Design And Analysis Of Pile Groups

Pile foundation is an important structure which is widely used for various purposes such as high-rise buildings,bridges,and offshore structures.However,it is difficult to give a pile foundation design due to complicated calculations.Few commercial programs are available for the design of pile group foundations especially if raking piles are included and the stiffness of piles are considered.Based on the elastic theory of beam on elastic foundation adopting the Zhang's method,the M-method,and the C-method,the interactions between piles and adjacent ground are analyzed using finite difference method to obtain the individual pile lateral and vertical stiffness constants at each pile head.Adopting the rigid cap design assumption,individual pile reaction and displacement are then calculated.The detailed analyses are coded with the Visual C++ programming language,so that friendly inputs and outputs can be performed on screen.The reaction and displacement of pile foundation are calculated with the K-method,M-method and c-method,respectively.The program can be used in the analyses of a pile group in a layered soil with both vertical and raking piles.The user can easily adjust the pile foundation stiffness by changing the pile dimensions,layouts so that optimum pile arrangement could be obtained.Using the developed program,three examples are analyzed with different boundary conditions.These three examples include a single pile,a pile group foundation with vertical piles,and a pile group foundation with raking piles.The calculated results demonstrate that the program can be used to design and analyze pile group foundation quickly and accurately and it can become a valuable tool for the designers.