Development of 3D Dynamic Numerical Simulation Method on a Soil-Pile System

The dynamic behavior of piles becomes very complex due to soil-pile dynamic interaction, soil non-linearity, resonance phenomena of soil-pile system and so on. Therefore, the proper numerical simulation of the pile behavior needs much effort and calculation time. In this research, a new modeling method, which can be applied to the conventional finite difference analysis program FLAC 3D, was developed to reduce the calculation time. The soil domain in this method is divided into a near-field region and a far-field region, which is not influenced by the soil-pile dynamic interaction. Then, the ground motion of the far-field is applied to the boundaries of the near-field instead of modeling the far-field region as finite meshes. In addition, the soil non-linearity behavior is modeled by using the hysteretic damping model, which determines the soil tangent modulus as a function of shear strain and the interface element was applied to simulate the separation and slip between the soil and pile. The proposed method reduced the calculation time by as much as one third compared with a usual modeling method and maintained the accuracy of the calculated results. The calculated results by the proposed method showed a good agreement with the prototype pile behavior, which was obtained by applying a similitude law to the 1-g shaking table test results.