Design and analyses of open-ended pipe piles in cohesionless soils

Large open-ended pipe pile has been found to be advantageous for use in transportation projects. The current design method, however, is not adequately developed. To close this practice gap, this paper first summarized different design methods for open-ended pipe piles in sandy soils. A major factor for all the design codes is to properly account for the formation and effects of soil plug. The comparison indicates that there is a large variation in the base capacity evaluation among different methods due to the complex behaviors of soil plug. To close the knowledge gap, discrete element method (DEM) was used to simulate the soil plugging process and provide insight on the plugging mechanism. The simulation results show that the arching effect significantly increases the internal unit shear resistance along pipe piles. The porosity distribution and particle contact force distribution from DEM model indicate a large stress concentration occurs at the bottom of the soil plug. Besides, nearly 90% of the plug resistance is provided by the bottom half portion of the soil column. The soil-pile friction coefficient has a significant effect on the magnitude of plug resistance, with the major transition occurred for friction coefficient between 0.3 and 0.4.