Boundary element analysis of capped pile groups

Abstract EN

The boundary element method (BEM) has become one of the most powerful numerical techniques which has already established itself within the scientific community.

The most striking feature of this technique is that, in principle, only the boundaries of the region being investigated have to be discretized, which therefore leads to many fewer discrete elements than any scheme requiring internal subdivision of the whole body.

This means that the number of unknowns is reduced dramatically, especially for 3D problems, as the unknowns occurred only on the boundary of the problem.

This paper is devoted to make use of the boundary element method (BEM) as a practical problem solving tool to analyze a soil-structure interaction problem.

The program (MRBEM) is adopted in this study for the analysis process.

It is a general purpose boundary element method program for solving elasticity and potential problems with multiple regions.

This program is written by FORTRN-90 language and developed during this study to solve a three dimensional problem represented by a group of piles.

The results were compared with those findings in some experimental and theoretical researches and good agreements were obtained.

It was found that when using the BEM in the analysis, the stresses and displacements need only to be calculated where the details of interest occur on the boundary or are localized to a particular part of the domain, and hence an entire domain solution is not required.

Moreover, boundary conditions at infinity can be modeled exactly without the need to extend the region a long distance away or to apply artificial boundary conditions as a result to the arbitrary truncation of the outer region.