lateral load on piles

[connect2]

Just curious ????:
Watching piles being 'sunk' ... for lack of a better word ie the weight of the hammer is sufficient to push the pile alone into the subsoil (about 100' of 'soft' clay), no driving force required. Question then: How exactly does one analyse the pile as a column for lateral loads? How are the end conditions modeled? What of the support? conditions along the length of the pile between the ends? They have welded a plate to the end of the pile to keep it from 'disappearing' on them. Quess thats 2 questions, and fairly obivious I know little about piles.

 

[SlideRuleEra]

Not sunk! Driven... well sort of, in the case you describe
Hammers running on steam (compressed air these days), vibratory hammers, and drop hammers can handle that situation. It is different for a diesel hammer - the lack of resistance can be a real problem. Without reasonably "stiff" soil, both the pile and ram just move downward with each stoke - there is not sufficient compression to ignite the diesel fuel. The hammer stops, (spitting out smoke & unburned diesel fuel) and has to be manually restarted. You wind up using it like a poorly designed drop hammer until you finally develop enough driving resistance for the hammer to operate.

Download "Bethlehem Steel H Pile" from this page of my website

http://www.slideruleera.net/Steel-Piling.html

Section 6 (page 21) briefly covers "Determining Unbraced Length".

Although unrelated to your question, you may be interested in the Corps of Engineers Document on Pile Driving Equipment (download from the same webpage)

http://www.SlideRuleEra.net