• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.323-331
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• 2020

Pile foundation is widely used for railway bridges in loess throughout northwestern China. Modeling of the loess-pile interaction is an essential part for seismic analysis of bridge with pile foundation at seismically active regions. A quasi-static test is carried out to investigate the hysteretic behaviors of pile foundation in collapsible loess. The failure characteristics of the bridge pile-loess system under the cyclic lateral loading are summarized. From the test results, the energy dissipation, stiffness degradation and ductility of the pile foundation in loess are analyzed. Therefore, a bilinear model with stiffness degradation is recommended for the nonlinearity of the bridge pier-pile-loess system. It can be found that the stiffness of the bridge pier-pile-loess system decreases quickly in the initial stage, and then becomes more slowly with the increase of the displacement ductility. The equivalent viscous damping ratio is defined as the ratio of the dissipated energy in one cycle of hysteresis curves and increases with the lateral displacement.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.929-946
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• 2017

Composite foundation treated with compaction piles can eliminate collapsibility and improve the bearing capacity of foundation in loess area. However, the large number of piles in the composite foundation leads to difficulties in the analysis of such type of engineering works. This paper proposes two simplified methods to quantify the stability of composite foundation treated with a large number of compaction piles. The first method is based on the principle of making the area replacement ratios of the simplified model as the same time as the practical engineering situation. Then, discrete piles arranged in a triangular shape can be simplified in the model where the annular piles and compacted soil are arranged alternately. The second method implements equivalent continuous treatment in the pile-soil area and makes the whole treated region equivalent to a type of composite material. Both methods have been verified using treated foundation of an oil storage tank. The results have shown that the differences in the settlement values obtained from the water filled test in the field and those calculated by the two simplified methods are negligible. Using stability analysis, the difference ratios of the static and dynamic safety factors of the composite foundation treated with compaction piles calculated by these two simplified methods are found to be 3.56% and 5.32%, respectively. At the same time, both static and dynamic safety factors are larger than the general safety factor, which should be greater than or equal to 2.0 according to the provisions in civil engineering. This indicates that after being treated with compaction piles, the bearing capacity of the composite foundation is effectively improved and the foundation has enough safety reserve.