Dynamic soil stiffness for foundation piles: Capturing 3D continuum effects in an effective, non-local 1D model

A method is presented to accurately capture the 3D interaction phenomena of a foundation pile embedded in soil, in a computationally efficient non-local 1D model. It is shown how to extract the global stiffness kernels from simulations with the 3D inhomogeneous continuum, and implement them in a 1D non-local Winkler-type model that can subsequently serve as a stand-alone, condensed substructure. The presented method for obtaining the kernels removes the need to assume certain distributions for these functions. We show that the method is very versatile, and yields accurate results for a wide range of pile geometries and soil stiffness profiles, over the full depth of the embedded pile. For the dynamic case, the discretized global stiffness kernels (matrices) become complex-valued (they include soil stiffness, inertia and damping), and the 1D model proves to be capable of mimicking also the out-of-phase part of the response. The method being straightforward and fast, the engineering community is served the benefits of accuracy (3D model) and speed (1D model), without the need of empiric tuning.