End-Bearing Granular Pile-Effect of Non-Linearity of Soil and Granular Pile

Abstract

The solutions for consideration of linear and non-linear non-homogeneity of floating granular pile in homogeneous soil conditions are available, still solutions are not available for non-homogeneous end-bearing granular pile in non-homogeneous soil conditions. The present paper deals with the mathematical solution, for calculating the top displacement, normalized shear stresses, normalized axial load and percentage load transferred to the base for the non-homogeneous end-bearing granular pile in non-homogeneous soil conditions based on the elastic continuum approach. The contemplation of non-homogeneity of the granular pile in the stiffness range of stone columns/granular piles in non-homogeneous soil mass is more realistic and could represent true in-situ behavior. The analysis concludes that with the increase of the degree of non-homogeneity of granular pile, the settlement influence factor decreases significantly for the shorter length of granular pile (L/d 20) because of higher values of deformation modulus of a granular pile at all depths as compared to modulus of longer ones. With the increase of soil non-homogeneity, the shear stresses decrease in the top 15 % and bottom 10 % portions of the granular pile while they increase in the rest (middle part) of its length. A comparative study has been made for present analysis and average analysis and it was found that by average analysis the values of settlement influence factors are underestimated in comparison to exact analysis therefore the average analysis is not suitable.