Dynamics of a Cylindrical Pile in a Transversely Isotropic Half-Space under Axial Excitations

Abstract

For the first time, a theoretical formulation is presented for the load-transfer analysis of an elastic cylindrical thin-walled pile immersed in a transversely isotropic half-space under axisymmetric excitations. By generating a set of weakly singular Green’s functions for the embedding medium and using a shell theory for the pile, it is shown that similar to the related interaction analysis in isotropic medium, the soil-structure interaction problem under consideration is reducible to two coupled Fredholm integral equations. Regarding the singular nature of stress transfer, a newly developed adaptive-gradient elements family is employed in the development of an accurate numerical scheme. The effect of soil material anisotropy on the dynamic interaction process is explored by presenting a set of numerical results for various material and geometrical conditions and various excitation frequencies. To confirm the accuracy of the proposed analytical and numerical scheme, numerical results are compared with benchmark solutions for the corresponding isotropic problem.