Designing Piled Foundations with a Full 3D Model

Received: February 5, 2018 Revised: February 23, 2018 Accepted: February 26, 2018 Abstract: Background: The analysis of piled foundations, where horizontal environmental loads play a very important role, has taken foundation design a step further in the 1970s and 80s. Nonlinear analyses considering P-y, T-z and Q-z curves became the state-of-the-art which also included group effect calculations thanks to an approximation proposed by [1] on the [2] equations. For some reason, however, foundation design continued to be refined using finite element calculations, but the corresponding developments never made their way into the main offshore platform design codes such as [3,4].