Monotonic and cyclic lateral behavior of semi-rigid pile in cement-improved clay: centrifuge tests and numerical investigation.

A systematic study into the behavior of reinforced semi-rigid piles in response to lateral monotonic and cyclic loading in clay was performed with centrifuge modeling tests (100×g). The aim was to investigate the pile–soil interaction mechanism of reinforced semi-rigid piles and to give some generally applicable design advice for reinforcing semi-rigid piles with cement-improved soil. For monotonic loading, the overall load–deflection behavior, profile of bending moment, net soil pressure and pile deflection have been fully studied, in addition to the p–y curves and excess pore pressure response of reinforced and unreinforced piles. It is found that shallow cement-improved soil reinforcement can greatly improve the lateral capacity of piles. In addition, a hyperbolic tangent model was proposed to fit the p–y curves obtained from monotonic tests for reinforced and unreinforced piles. For cyclic loading, it was found that compared with unreinforced piles, reinforced semi-rigid piles reduce the accumulation of pile deflection and the degradation of stiffness. The trends of the cyclic bending moment and cyclic p–y curves are also revealed. A series of supplementary finite element analyses were conducted to study the effects of reinforcement parameters (reinforced width, reinforced depth and strength of cement-improved soil) on lateral pile capacity. It is suggested that shallow reinforcement with a reinforced width of 5D and a reinforced depth above the rotation point of a semi-rigid pile is both economical and practical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]