A simple load transfer method for energy pile groups

Various analysis methods have been developed to simulate the performance of energy pile groups subjected to thermal and mechanical loads. Although they considered the interactions between piles in the group, the ‘sheltering-reinforcing’ effect was usually ignored during the analysis, or the methods were not experimentally validated. Therefore, to address this gap, we propose an experimentally validated load transfer model that considers the ‘sheltering-reinforcing’ effect for the thermomechanical analysis of energy pile groups. The proposed method modeled two well-documented full-scale field tests and two finite-element simulation cases. The comparison results showed that the proposed method could capture several essential aspects of the energy pile group, including thermally induced strain, stress, displacement, and group effects. Furthermore, a parametric analysis was performed to evaluate the effects of relevant parameters on the thermomechanical behavior of the energy pile group.