ANALYSIS OF PILES USED FOR SLOPE STABILIZATION

Piles used for the stabilization of slopes have to be adequately desig ned to resist the induced lateral loads due to the movement of the uns table slope. In this paper, a numerical method is presented for the an alysis of this problem. In this approach, the piles are modelled using beam finite elements. The soil response at the individual piles is mo delled using the modulus of subgrade reaction and pile-soil-pile inter action considered using the theory of elasticity. Two case histories, one for single pile and the other for pile group, are analysed which s how that the numerical model can predict the general characteristics o f the piles reasonably well. The study suggests that the design of the piles based on the computed response from single pile analysis, ignor ing group effects, may be unduly conservative.