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    Mei Et Al. (2018)

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    Manaswini Vadlamani

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 4

    Use of Drainage Holes on Reinforced Concrete Pipe

    Piles to Accelerate Soil Consolidation

    Guoxiong Mei1 ✉ , Pengpeng Ni2, Meijuan Xu1, and Yanlin Zhao1


    ( )

    1
    Key Laboratory of Disaster Prevention and Structural Safety of Ministry of Education,
    College of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
    meiguox@163.com
    2
    School of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore

    Abstract. This paper investigates the application of permeable piles (reinforced


    concrete pipe piles with drainage holes) to accelerate soil consolidation during
    pile driving. To achieve that, finite element models are generated in ABAQUS
    with infinite element boundary condition. The results of numerical analyses show
    that the performance of permeable piles can be improved by drilling drainage
    holes. However, the influence of these openings on the structural performance of
    permeable piles has not been evaluated before. The structural behavior of perme‐
    able piles is investigated in this study using uniaxial compression tests and four
    point flexure tests. Although drainage holes could reduce the ultimate compres‐
    sive strength of pile specimens, the measured values were much larger than design
    specifications. For bending tests, cracks with smaller width were initiated and
    propagated over an increasingly wider area in permeable piles, and an improved
    flexural capacity was obtained. These results of the current study show that
    permeable pile is an attractive alternative to accelerate soil consolidation.

    Keywords: Permeable piles · Drainage holes · Soil consolidation

    1 Introduction

    During pile driving, excess pore water pressures are generated in the vicinity of the pile,
    and the dissipation of these excess water pressures will take weeks or months especially
    in sensitive clays. In practice, drainage paths are often introduced near the pile to speed
    up the soil consolidation process, such as the techniques of prefabricated vertical drains,
    sand drains, and stone columns. It should be emphasized that the maximum excess
    pressure occurs at the soil-pile interface. All these measures cannot be installed at loca‐
    tions that are too close to the driven pile.
    Some alternative solutions of introducing vertical drainage paths in the soil emerged
    recently, including pervious concrete ground-improvement piles [1] and permeable pipe
    piles [2, 3]. Pervious concrete piles have limitations in strength to resist loads in the
    axial and lateral directions compared to normal concrete piles [1, 4]. Contrarily, perme‐
    able pile is made of normal reinforced concrete, with drainage holes drilled around the

    © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018


    W. Wu and H.-S. Yu (Eds.): Proceedings of China-Europe Conference
    on Geotechnical Engineering, SSGG, pp. 1001–1004, 2018.
    https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97115-5_25
    1002 G. Mei et al.

    circumference the pile as illustrated in Fig. 1. The arrangement of these drainage holes
    will be opened to enable the dissipation of excess pore pressures, once the driving
    process is completed. This investigation will demonstrate the effectiveness of permeable
    piles in accelerating soil consolidation using numerical simulations. Both compression
    and flexural tests are conducted to check whether opening drainage holes will result in
    a reduction of strength for permeable piles.

    Fig. 1. Schematics of (a) normal pile and (b) permeable pile.

    2 Results of Finite Element Analysis

    A three-dimensional finite element model is developed in ABAQUS to simulate the


    behavior of permeable piles, with the incorporation of infinite elements at lateral boun‐
    daries. Details of the modelling strategy can be referred to Ni et al. [2]. The average
    degrees of consolidation (Uavg) are calculated for normal and permeable piles embedded
    in three soils with different hydraulic conductivity (k), Fig. 2. One can see that the soil
    around permeable piles always has a higher Uavg value at a specific time. The consoli‐
    dation curve moves to the left when drainage holes are opened for permeable piles, which
    demonstrates that the soil consolidation process is accelerated.

    Fig. 2. Comparison of Uavg between normal and permeable piles.


    Use of Drainage Holes on Reinforced Concrete Pipe Piles 1003

    3 Results of Uniaxial Compression Tests

    Two series of uniaxial compression tests (different concrete strength of C50 and C80)
    have been performed on permeable pile specimens. Details of the testing program can
    be found in Ni et al. [5]. Figure 3 depicts the correlation between the strength reduction
    and the opening ratio of drainage holes. The ultimate compressive strength decreases
    monotonically with openings, until a plateau of strength reduction of 80% is reached.
    Calculations are carried out to determine the minimum required compressive strength
    for normal piles, which is found to be much less than the measured values for permeable
    piles. Drainage holes only reduce the ultimate compressive strength by a maximum of
    20%, and permeable piles still fulfill the design needs.

    Fig. 3. Reduction in ultimate compressive strength due to the opening of drainage holes.

    4 Results of Four Point Flexural Tests

    Four point flexural tests are performed on six prototype-scale permeable piles. Interested
    readers can find more details regarding the testing program in Ni et al. [5]. The patterns
    of cracks in the concrete at the end of the tests are plotted in Fig. 4 for six piles. Cracks
    in the normal pile are more concentrated, whereas cracks in the permeable pile spread
    more over a wider area. The widths of all cracks are mapped, and it is found that the
    widest crack always occurs in the normal pile. All cracks first initiate from the weak
    zone in the pile. For permeable piles, the spread of cracks through multiple weak zones
    can help to redistribute the flexural moment.
    The variations of bending moment with the applied load are drawn in Fig. 5. As
    expected, the measured bending moments from both normal and permeable piles are
    comparable at lower loads, which follow a linear pattern of theoretical solution. With
    the increase of the applied load, the measured values deviate from the analytical solution.
    At the same load in a later stage, the bending moment of permeable pile is lower than
    that of normal pile, which explains that less significant cracks are observed for permeable
    pile. This also demonstrates that drilling drainage holes can help permeable piles to
    withstand a higher level of flexure.
    1004 G. Mei et al.

    Fig. 4. Distribution of cracks in normal pile: (a), (b) and (c), and permeable pile: (d), (e) and (f).

    Fig. 5. Measured bending moment for normal (1#) and permeable (4#) piles.

    References

    1. Suleiman, M.T., Ni, L., Raich, A.: Development of pervious concrete pile ground-improvement
    alternative and behavior under vertical loading. J. Geotech. Geoenviron. Eng. 140(7),
    04014035 (2014)
    2. Ni, P., Mangalathu, S., Mei, G., Zhao, Y.: Permeable piles: an alternative to improve the
    performance of driven piles. Comput. Geotech. 84, 78–87 (2017)
    3. Ni, P., Mangalathu, S., Mei, G., Zhao, Y.: Laboratory investigation of pore pressure dissipation in
    clay around permeable piles. Can. Geotech. J. (2017). https://doi.org/10.1139/cgj-2017-0180
    4. Suleiman, M.T., Ni, L., Raich, A., Helm, J., Ghazanfari, E.: Measured soil-structure interaction
    for concrete piles subjected to lateral loading. Can. Geotech. J. 52(8), 1168–1179 (2015)
    5. Ni, P., Mangalathu, S., Mei, G., Zhao, Y.: Compressive and flexural behaviour of reinforced
    concrete permeable piles. Eng. Struct. 147, 316–327 (2017)

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