Mechanical Behavior of Geothermal Piles Due To Thermal Changes by Numerical Analysis

The word energy pile which is trending nowadays in the field of renewable energy resources, comes from the concept of ground source heat pump which taps the ground thermal energy and transfers it above the ground since the ground temperature is constant. The space constraint has made the researchers to bring out a new idea of tapping the energy from the ground through the pile foundation which is used as a deep foundation for mechanical load transfer. This project deals with the determination of the mechanical behavior of this geothermal pile where the deformation and stresses are the main parameters to be determined. These parameters vary at every point in the pile. So to analyze this, Finite Element Method has been used. The FEM has been used by writing a code on MATLAB software. The Pile and soil has been assumed to be homogeneous linear elastic model for simplicity in calculation and analysis. The Finite Element method has been initially validated for the simple problem and then the mechanical load and thermal load are applied step by step. A mechanical load of 1600kN has been applied on a pile of 0.3m diameter for different temperature variations and the different pile depth to be used has been found. The maximum stress of the soil at the base of the pile which is 46kPa has been kept constant and found the variations in mechanical and thermal load for different radius and depth of pile. It has been observed that the pile and soil follow the same pattern of deformation as in the real case and the deformation values are in close agreement with the experimental results referred