Effect of Loading Rate on Lateral Pile-Soil Interaction in Sand Considering Partially Drained Condition

Reliable assessment of the lateral pile-soil interaction is of pronounced importance for the design of mono-pile foundations of offshore wind turbines. As the offshore engineering moves to deeper waters, the diameter of mono-piles is getting larger, usually about 5 m and could be up to 8 m, which may lead to partially drained behaviors of sand in the vicinity of the pile and thus imply limitations of conventional design methods in which fully drained conditions were assumed. To shed light on this issue, a fully-coupled finite element model was established using an in-house developed finite element code DBLEAVES, incorporating a cyclic mobility constitutive model that is capable of describing the instantaneous contractive and dilative response of sands simultaneously. Triaxial and centrifuge model tests were conducted to calibrate the constitutive model and validate the pile-soil interaction model respectively. This is followed by a parametric study primarily focusing on the effects of loading rates. The initial stiffness of the p-y curve was found to increase with the loading rate whilst the bearing capacity showed the inverse, and the mechanism behind this phenomenon is examined in detail. Then an explicit model was developed to evaluate the development of excess pore pressure in the pile front upon lateral loading, and an upper boundary of normalized loading rate was identified to distinguish fully and partially drained conditions.