Buckling Analysis of Pile during Hammer Placement

Large diameter and thin thickness are the main characteristics of the steel pipe piles in offshore engineering. Before piling a pile, heavy hammer will be placed on the top of it, which may emerge a serious risk in pile buckling. A three dimensional finite element model of pile and soil was established for a case study. The modified Riks method which can automatically search a suitable increment factor of loads is adopted to assess the stability of the pile, and the geometric nonlinearity and pile-soil interaction were both considered. The practical example shows that the critical load considering pile-soil interaction is much smaller than that in a fixed constraint.