Randolph, M. F., Leong, E. C. & Houlsby, G. T. (1991). Géotechnique 41, No. 4, 587-598 One-dimensional analysis of soil plugs in pipe piles M. F. RANDOLPH,* E. C. LEONG* and G. T. HOULSBY+ Under static loading in compression, open-ended piles may fail in a plugged mode, with the soil plug moving with the pile, or in an unplugged mode, with shear failure occurring between the soil plug and the pile shaft. It may be shown that, under drained loading conditions, the former mode of failure will generally occur, because arching action within the pipe pile leads to high frictional capacity of the plug. However, under faster rates of loading relevant to the offshore environment, the increase in effective stresses within the soil plug is limited and the plug capacity is significantly lower. The Paper presents a simple one-dimensional analysis of the soil plug under partially drained conditions. The analysis has been implemented numerical, and the resulting program used to derive design charts which give the plug capacity as a function of the soil plug parameters and the rate of loading. These design charts are presented in appropriate non-dimensional form, with example calculations included for typical offshore piles in calcareous soil. KEYWORDS: analysis; bearing capacity ; consolidation; offshore geotechnics; piles; soil-structure interaction. Sous chargement statique en compression les pieuz bouts ouverts peuvent subir la rupture dans le mode bouché, dans lequel le bouchon de sol se meut avec le pieu, ou bien dans le mode non- bouché, dans lequel Ia rupture au cisaillement a licu entre le bouchon de sol et le fat du pieu. On peut démonstrer que dans des conditions drainées le mode bouché aura lieu en général, car Peffet de voate 4 Vintérieur du pieu creux provoque une haute capacité de frottement dans le bouchon. Avec des vitesses supérieures de chargement dans environnement en mer Paccroissement des con- traintes effectives a Pintérieur du bouchon de sol est cependant limité et la capacité du bouchon est réduite d’une facon importante. Cet article pré- ‘sente une analyse unidimensionnelle trés simple du bouchon de sol dans des conditions partiellement drainées, L’analyse a éé développée de facon numérique et le programme qui en résulte est uti- lisé pour construire des abaques de profeteurs qui donnent la capacité du bouchon en fonction des paramétres du bouchon de sol et de la vitesse de chargement. Ces abaques de construction sont pré- ‘sentées dans une forme non-dimensionnelle conven- able, en incluant des exemples de calculs pour des pieux typiques dans un sol calcaire en mer. INTRODUCTION Open-ended steel tubes are commonly used for driven piles, particularly for offshore foundations. During installation, a plug of soil will move up the inside of the pile, with the top of the plug maintaining, approximately, its original level. Measurements of plug length in prototype piles generally lie within 10-20% of the embedded length of the pile. In rare cases, such as driving through dense sand layers, the pile may ‘plug’ during driving, with the soil plug becoming locked in the pile, and further penetration occurring as if the pile were closed-ended. In such situations, the driving resistance _ increases sharply, and it may become necessary to drill out Discussion on this Paper closes 1 April 1992; for further details see p. ii, * University of Western Australia. + University of Oxford. 587 the internal plug of soil in order to advance the pile to the required penetration. Tt has been customary to assess whether a pile will act in a plugged mode (with the pile acting essentially as a closed-ended pile) or an unplugged mode (with shear failure occurring between the soil plug and the pile shaft) by a simple static analysis. Thus, the pile will fail in a plugged mode if the shear capacity along the length of the soil plug exceeds the end-bearing capacity at the base of the plug (see Fig. 1). However, during driving, the inertia of the soil plug encourages slip relative to the pile, prevent- ing plugging of the pile (Smith, To & Willson, 1986; Randolph, 1987). Thus, most open-ended piles will fill up with soil during driving, but fail as closed-ended piles during static loading (Paikowsky, Whitman & Baligh, 1990). The same is generally true of H-section piles: soil will fill up between the flanges during driving, but the piles588 RANDOLPH, LEONG AND HOULSBY Pile wall n= poy End-bearing tS: Go Fig. 1. Stress conditions within soil plug: top right, equi- librium of horizontal slice of soil; bottom right, Mohr’s Circle of stress for point A of soil slice will generally fail as box sections during static loading. Referring to Fig. 1, consider a pipe pile of inter- nal diameter d, containing a soil plug of overall length h. Suppose that the average internal skin friction is @, while the ultimate end-bearing pres- sure at the base of the soil plug is g,. The end- bearing capacity of the pile is then the lesser of Oyo = dh, nd? @ ne = do where the subscripts bo and be refer to whether the base capacity is limited by the pile-failing in an open-ended (unplugged) or closed-ended (plugged) mode. The ratio of the two values is 2) For typical ratios of internal skin friction to end-bearing pressure, the geometry of most piles of practical interest ensures that the ratio in equa- tion (2) will be greater than unity, and most open- ended piles will fail in a plugged mode during static loading. However, there are a number of situations where there may be concern over the adequacy of the internal skin friction. Thus, where piles are driven through soft soil to bear on a firmer stratum, or in carbonate soil where exter- nal skin friction is known to be very low, the shear capacity of the soil plug may be insufficient to mobilize the full potential end-bearing capac- ity. Historically, values of internal skin friction have generally been assumed to be comparable with values of external skin friction. Such an approach is consistent with measurements obtained during pile driving. Thus, Raines, Siciliano & Hyden (1988) have shown that the internal skin friction under dynamic conditions— deduced from the driving characteristics of piles and conductors in Bass Strait—is similar to the residual skin friction along the outside of the pile. The external skin friction is very low, which in turn has led to pessimistic treatment of the soil plug capacity. On the North West Shelf of Aus- tralia, the internal soil plugs in the piled founda- tions for the North Rankin A platform were drilled out and replaced by grout plugs because of concerns over the plug capacity (Khorshid, Haggerty & Male, 1988). The magnitude of the internal skin friction, 1), is clearly critical in determining whether or not a pile will plug. Under static loading, the confined condition of the soil plug within the pile shaft leads to radically different values of internal skin friction and external skin friction. Kishida & Isemoto (1977) have demonstrated experimentally that arching action occurs within pipe piles, leading to very high values of internal friction. Intuitively, it is reasonable to expect that, as load is applied to the base of the soil plug, the increased axial stress will lead to a corresponding increase in the lateral stress, and hence the skin friction, at the pile/soil interface. It is straightfor- ward to show that, for drained conditions with a given ratio of internal skin friction to the local axial effective stress within the soil plug, the potential end-bearing capacity of soil plugs increases exponentially with the aspect ratio h/d (Randolph, 1988). Arching action within the pile, and resulting high internal friction, relies on the ability of the soil to drain, allowing the effective stress level to rise. If the loading were to be conducted under undrained conditions, the increase in axial stress would be carried by excess pore pressure, with no change in mean effective stress. The available skin friction would thus remain close to the value prior to loading. In offshore applications, piles have to with- stand relatively high rates of loading during storm conditions, which will limit the increase in effective stresses within the soil plug. Thus the simple drained analysis of the soil plug capacity presented by Randolph (1988) has to be extended to conditions of partial drainage. For complete- ness, the analytical solutions for the plug response under (a) undrained and (b) drained conditions will be summarized first. The algebra and numeri-SOIL PLUGS IN PIPE PILES 589 cal solution for the partially drained case will then be presented, retaining the one-dimensional treatment of the soil plug. Example applications of the one-dimensional analysis are included, both at model scale where the computed response is compared with experi- mental results, and at prototype scale for a typical offshore application in carbonate soil. Design charts are presented in non-dimensional form, giving the normalized bearing capacity of the soil plug as a function of plug geometry, soil properties and time-scale of loading. UNDRAINED AND DRAINED PLUG RESPONSE A simple analytical treatment of the soil plug response under drained conditions has been pre- sented by Randolph (1988) (see also Kishida & Isemoto, 1977). The soil plug is treated as a series of horizontal discs (see Fig. 1), with each disc acted on by vertical stresses, o, at the top and «, + do, at the bottom, and shear stress t, at the pile wall. The effective unit weight of the soil is »’. The equation of vertical equilibrium of the slice of soil at any depth z may be written as saya 3) de et ¥tgh QB) The internal shear stress between the soil and the pile wall may be expressed as. = Boy @ where o,’ is the vertical effective stress in the plug at that level. The value of f will depend on the ratio of hori- zontal to vertical effective stress in the plug, which ratio is difficult to estimate after install- ation by driving. However, for design purposes, a minimum value of f may be obtained by assuming that the soil near the edge of the plug is at active failure, with internal angle of friction ¢ and interface friction angle between soil and pile 6. Fig. 1 shows the limiting Mohr’s circle, from which it may be shown that sin @ sin (A — 6) 1+ sin ¢ cos (A — 6) where sin A = sin d/sin d. The variation of f with ¢ for different ratios of tan é/tan ¢ is shown in Fig. 2. The value of B is relatively insensitive to in the range of practical interest, but more sensitive to the ratio tan 5/ tan $, which will depend on the surface roughness of the pile shaft and the grain size of the plug material. For typical surface roughnesses of prototype piles, tan d/tan ¢ may be expected to (5) 04 tan ditan @ Interface stress ratio 8 0 10 20 30 40 50 Soil friction angle ¢ : degrees Fig. 2. Variation of limiting stress ratio, , with friction angles 5 and lie in the range 0-7-0-9, giving B values in the range 0-15-0-23. Undrained response Consider an initial effective stress distribution given by © ial (effective) surcharge acting at z=0. If the soil plug is loaded in an undrained mode, with no change in effective stress, then the shear stress at failure may be estimated as = Bp +72) a This gives a lower bound to the shear stress, and higher values may occur if the initial ratio of hori- zontal to vertical effective stress in the soil plug exceeds f cot 5 (see Fig. 1). Equation (3) may be integrated to give the ver- tical stress at any depth as P+Oet V+ 4B p+ Biv (8) At the base of a soil plug of height h, the undrained capacity (above p + 7, h + y/h) is then oe = ap + O°Sen'h 0) where a = 4fh/d. It is helpful to express this in non-dimensional form as Go P Ba + 05: Fan tq tO i) Since the response is assumed undrained, there will be no compression of the soil plug, and the (idealized) response will be rigid-plastic with a capacity as given above, Drained response At the other extreme, if the soil plug is loaded very slowly, so that no excess pore pressures