Soil-water coupling finite element analysis on seismic enhancement effect of group-pile foundation with ground improvement

In this paper, soil-water coupling finite element analyses on a real-scale field test of 9-pile foundation subjected to horizontal cyclic loading is conducted at first using a program named as DBLEAVES (Ye, 2007). In the analysis, nonlinear behaviors of ground and piles are described by cyclic mobility model (Zhang et al, 2007) and axial force dependent model (AFD model) proposed by Zhang and Kimura (2002) which can take into consideration of axial-force dependency in the nonlinear moment-curvature relations. After the applicability of the proposed numerical method is verified by comparing the numerical results with the field test results, numerical experiments on seismic enhancement effect of group-pile foundation with ground improvement are conducted both in static loading and dynamic loading. In finding out the optimum pattern of ground improvement around existing pile foundation, three influential factors are considered in the numerical experiments, that is, the size, the location and the shape of ground-improvement zone around the pile group.