Energy and variational principles for piles in dissipative soil

Abstract

Energy and variational principles have provided a valuable tool to analyse the behaviour of elastic structures for quite a long time. They have also been used infrequently to study soil–pile interaction problems, following the traditional methods that were developed for elastic structures. One of the possible reasons for the gap in applications is that soil is not a non-dissipative elastic medium. This paper presents an alternative energy-based variational approach that does account for the inelastic dissipative nature of soils. Other than theoretical advantages, the new approach seems very promising for practical reasons. This approach allows the recovery of an inherent set of differential equations, which in particular cases of proportional monotonic loading conditions may become identical to the previous equations obtained from the ‘elasticity’ methods. The new method also allows modelling of the kinematic hardening nature of the soil during cyclic loading events.