FEM analysis of wasted tire chip and sand as construction material for piles

The pile foundation can be easily damaged in the earthquake event and there is a need to reinforce the foundation to protect the superstructure. The aim of this study is to propose a material for pile foundation by using wasted tire chips mixed with sand (i.e. sand-tire mixture) and study its effectiveness in an earthquake incident. This idea is learned from many sand-tire mixtures investigations. Laboratory monotonic triaxial tests were conducted based on the pure Nevada sand and sand-tire mixture (i.e. volume of sand to volume of tire was 6:4 in this study) as the input parameters for the subsequent numerical simulation. The numerical simulation was based on a centrifuge experimental results, which was also validated in this study. The simulation results show that the proposed method has a good effectiveness for a pile foundation, since the reduction in terms of the bending moment acting on the pile foundation is significant. In addition, even in the earthquake incident, the pile foundation still has the lateral support contributed from the adjacent sand-tire mixture, which is able to protect the pile foundation from buckling and fractured. This pile foundation behaviour is different from that supported by the pure sand (i.e. without sand-tire mixture), which has zero lateral support to the pile foundation in the earthquake incident. However, there is an optimal reinforced length for the sand-tire mixture, where the effectiveness becomes insignificant.