Free-Field Measurements to Disclose Lateral Reaction Mechanism of Piles Subjected to Soil Movements

Soil-pile interaction remains to be the most ambiguous yet one of the most crucial aspects in the design of laterally loaded soil-pile systems subjected to embankment-induced movements. This paper proposes a new method that is capable of producing soil stiffness degradation curves, which are the outcome of real field behavior through free-field measurements. Soil-pile interaction mechanism can be solved with the proposed method for any possible case either the piles are constructed before the embankment construction or during and after. For any time considered, the method enables the computation of resultant stress effects on the pile cross section and the accompanying deflections. To provide a basis of comparison, an example problem has been solved with the proposed method and with two well-known commercial finite-element softwares. Obtained results indicated the capability of the proposed method to disclose real field behavior, which can be attributed to its inherent property of being also an observational method.