Assessment of improvement in lateral capacity of pile due to FRP materials under static and dynamic lateral loads.

Pile foundation is a viable solution when loads are heavy and the supporting soil is weak. When the topsoil adjacent to the pile is too weak to bear applied lateral loads, there is a need to improve the lateral load-carrying capacity of the pile. In this study, fibre reinforced polymers (FRP) have been employed to accomplish the aforementioned objective. Finite element analysis has been conducted on a mono pile of length of 16 m and diameter of 0.3 m confined with FRP (glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) and carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP)) subjected to static and dynamic lateral loads imposed by the rotary machine. A linear elastic model is used to simulate the concrete pile and the Mohr–Coulomb failure criterion is utilised to represent the soil layers. After successful validation, a parametric study has been conducted by considering various factors such as the diameter of the pile, the grade of concrete, the wrapping length of FRP, the types of fibre, the intensity of the dynamic load and the type of soil to optimise the feasibility of using FRP as a piling material. Load versus deformation and frequency versus amplitude response curves are plotted for static and dynamic cases respectively for various concerned factors. Numerical results indicated that the FRP wraps around the pile significantly improved the lateral load carrying capacity of the pile under lateral static and dynamic loads. It is suggested to extend the FRP wrapping till the depth of fixity and employ CFRP over GFRP to yield the optimum results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]