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Energy storage pile foundations are being developed for storing renewable energy by utilizing compressed air energy storage technology. Previous studies on isolated piles indicate that compressed air can result in pressure and temperature fluctuations in the pile, which can further affect safety of the pile foundation. Meanwhile, the temperature changes and distributions for the pile and surrounding soil also are influenced by adjacent piles in typical group pile constructions. Therefore, dynamic thermal transfer simulations were conducted in this paper to investigate the temperature changes and distributions in the concrete pile and surrounding soil for group pile construction. The main parameter in this study is the spacing of the piles. The analysis results show that the group pile effect significantly increases the temperature up to more than 100 °C depending on the location and changes its distribution in both concrete and soil due to the heat transferred from the adjacent piles. The final stabilized temperature can be as high as 120 °C in the concrete pile and 110 °C in the soil after numerous loading cycles, which is about 4 times higher than typical thermo-active energy pile applications. Thus, it is important to include the group pile effect for design and analysis of the energy storage pile foundation.

Reactive Powder Concrete (RPC) is a newly emerging concrete material that is being used for various applications where high-strength concrete is required. RPC is obtained by removing coarse aggregates and adding fine powders such as silica fume into the concrete mixture. This research has focused on the proportioning and characterization of RPC mixture to be used as a material for energy storage pile application. For mixture parameters, the water-to-binder ratio (WB), silica fume (SF) content, and normal and warm temperature curing have been selected. The relative flowability, penetration resistance, setting time, drying shrinkage, and compressive and flexural strengths were evaluated. Based on the test results, the mixture with WB = 0.22 and SF = 20% was the best mixture with the highest tensile strength and other characteristics. Response surface methodology (RSM) was used to design the experiments and find the optimum mixture proportions to achieve the highest compressive strength. The optimum WB and SF content to achieve the highest strength for combined ages (7 days, 28 days, and 56 days) was determined to be WB = 0.213 and SF = 20%. Through the comparison between the test results and the required strength from analytical simulations, the RPC studied in this paper was deemed to be suitable for the energy storage pile.