“Computational Civil Engineering - "Intersections" International Journal

“Computational Civil Engineering 2005”, International Symposium 149The working connection between piles and jacket is modelled with elastic smallframes placed at the joints of the jacket bellow level +3.00 and dimensioned insuch a manner to allow elastic independent deformations between piles and jacket.This solution lead to the values of the horizontal displacements at each pile jointscorrelated with the displacements of the piles at the interior part of the columns andwith the displacements of the jacket joints under loads. The calculation is made insome successive steps, for a applied load on the pile about 1000 to (value which isnear to the maximum capacity of the pile), establishing in this way the crosssection characteristics of the finite elements forming the frames according to theirreal stiffness. The first two elements of the working frames (the horizontal elementat the bottom of the frame and the vertical element) results with a circular crosssection having a 0.428 m diameter, and the top horizontal element, which allowrelative independent displacements along the piles, between piles and jacket, wasdesigned as a steel plate, having a very high stiffness value in horizontal plane andvery small stiffness value in vertical plane (figure 2).PileJacketElastic frameconnectionBracesHorizontalFigure 2 – Detail for the elastic frame connection between pile and jacketThe soil piles bearing is made through straight beam elements with two nodeswhich can take only axial force (pin ended beams) and having a unity length. Theseelements are placed along the piles at distances established according to each soillayer depth. The variable cross sections of these frames comes out from thecondition that the settlement (which is dependent on the coefficient of soil reactionat the level of the corresponding frame element) under the pressure produced bythe soil on the interaction surface of a pile from a unity load is equivalent with theaxial deformation produced by the same load to a pin ended beam having 1mlength, cross section A and elasticity modulus of the material E (2.1x 10 7 to/m 2 forsteel).