Viscoelastic analysis of piles and pile groups

Abstract The axial and lateral load–displacement response of single piles and pile groups during the secondary consolidation (creep) phase of deformation is obtained by idealizing the soil as a linear viscoelastic material. The boundary element method is used to model the soil halfspace and the piles, which are assumed to behave elastically, are idealized as beam‐columns. By using the correspondence principle, the problem is solved in the Laplace transform domain and the final solution is obtained by numerical inversion of the transformed data. The salient features of the viscoelastic response are identified in several non‐dimensional plots which encompass the spectrum of geometrical and material parameters commonly encountered in practice. The results of the analysis compare favourably with the limited data available in the literature.