Laterally-Loaded Pile Foundation

Example Provided by: Christopher McGann, University of Washington

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This article describes the OpenSees implementation of a simple laterally-loaded pile example. The problem is modeled as a beam on a nonlinear Winkler foundation (BNWF), utilizing displacement-based beam elements for the pile and nonlinear spring elements which represent the vertical and lateral response of the surrounding soil.

Provided with this article are the files needed to execute this analysis in OpenSees;

• the main input file, staticBNWFpile.tcl
• three procedures to define the soil constitutive behavior, get_pyParam.tcl, get_tzParam.tcl, and get_qzParam.tcl
• a file to define the pile section behavior, elasticSection.tcl

To run this example, the user must download each of the above files and place them in a single directory. Once this has been done, the user can then type "source staticBNWFpile.tcl" into the interpreter of the OpenSees.exe application to run the analysis. Representative results are presented in this article to verify the correct implementation of this example. Additionally, the pile response obtained from this analysis is compared to a similar analysis conducted using the commercial program LPile (http://www.ensoftinc.com) to provide verification the results of the OpenSees analysis.

Model Description

File:Schematic.pdf