Seismic Response of Floating Piles to Obliquely Incident Waves

The response of single piles under vertically and obliquely incident SH, SV, and P waves is obtained using a hybrid boundary element (BEM) formulation. The piles are represented by compressible beam-column elements and the soil as a hysteretic viscoelastic half-space. A recently developed Green function corresponding to the dynamic Mindlin problem is implemented in the numerical formulation. Exact analytical solutions for the differential equations for the piles under distributed harmonic excitations are used. Treating the half-space as a three-dimensional elastic continuum, the interaction problem is formulated by satisfying equilibrium and displacement compatibility along the pile-soil interface. Solutions adopted for the seismic waves are obtained by direct integration of the differential equations in terms of amplitudes. Salient features of the seismic response are identified in several non-dimensional plots. Results of the analyses compare favourably with the limited data available in the literature