Study on the squeezing effect of open-ended pipe piles

During the installation of a pipe pile, the soil around the pile will be squeezed out. This paper deals with this squeezing effect of open-ended pipe piles using the cylindrical cavity expansion theory. The characteristics of soil with different tension and compression moduli and dilation are involved by applying the elastic theory with different moduli and logarithmic strain. The closed-form solutions of the radius of the plastic region, the displacement of the boundary between the plastic region and the elastic region and the expansion pressure on the external surface of the pipe piles are obtained. When obtaining these solutions, the soil plug in the open-ended pipe pile is considered by employing an incremental filling ratio to quantify the degree of soil plugging. Moreover, the effects of the ratio of tension and compression moduli, angle of dilation and incremental filling ratio on the radius of the plastic region and the expansion pressure on the external surface of the pipe pile are investigated. The parametric analyses show that it is necessary and important to consider the difference between the tension modulus and compression modulus, dilation angle and incremental filling ratio for studying the squeezing effect of open-ended pipe pile installation. It is concluded that the analytical solutions presented in this paper are suitable for studying the squeezing effect of open-ended pipe piles.