Please be aware that this software is not intended to be used in any commercial analysis and/or design. All contributors of NHERI SimCenter are free of responsibility and liability resulting from the use of this software. Use of this software is at your own risk.
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Peter Mackenzie-Helnwein Research Associate Professor University of Washington, Seattle https://www.ce.washington.edu/people/faculty/mackenziep Main developer. Feature design, FEA module, GUI design. Performed most implementation. Coordination between this team. |
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Tatsu Sweet Student in Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Washington, Seattle sweetta@uw.edu Implementing graphic features; porting to Qwt. |
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Pedro Arduino Professor University of Washington, Seattle https://www.ce.washington.edu/people/faculty/arduinop Tool feature design. |
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Frank McKenna Chief Information Officer/Manager OpenSees Ecosystem University of California, Berkeley fmckenna@ce.berkeley.edu GUI and base implementation of version 1.0. Consultant for version 2.0. |
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Alborz Ghofrani Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Washington, Seattle alborzgh@uw.edu GUI design; soil modeling; testing. |
We, the SimCenter software designers, are asking you to share your suggestions on how to improve this educational tool by reporting issues at https://github.com/NHERI-SimCenter/QtPile. We further appreciate your feedback concerning use cases and potential improvements through our web interface available through the Help->Provide Feedback menu entry.
The SimCenter Pile Group Tool provides a live interface to study the behavior of a pile or pile group in layered soil. It allows the user to interactively (and nearly instantly) observe the system's response to changes of the following parameters:
Presented results include
The soil-structure system is modeled using the OpenSees finite element platform [1].
The pile group is represented as multiple displacement-based elastic beams, connected by a semi-rigid pile cap. The connection between piles and pile cap can be modeled as flexible (hinged) or moment bearing (equal DOF constraint).
Soil-structure interaction is represented by appropriate nonlinear p-y spring (t-z spring) elements for lateral (axial) movement. Spring properties are computed using Hansen's method [2] and recommendations by the American Petroleum Institute (API) [3]. A toe resistance can be added using an isolated T-z spring at the toe of each pile.
The Pile Group Tool constructs a structurally and numerically appropriate finite element mesh, computes spring properties from soil properties, and places spring elements accordingly. The actual simulation employs a Newton-Raphson iterative procedure to solve the governing nonlinear system of equations.
The user can quickly explore the effect of changing pile and soil properties to lateral pile deformation, internal pile moment and shear distributions, overburden stress in the soil, and spring parameters as obtained through Hansen [2] and API [3] procedures. Moreover, the user can easily add and remove piles by the click of a button to observe the effect of a pile group versus a single pile foundation.