Horizontal bearing capacity of monopile in three-dimensional spatially varying soils with linearly increasing mean strength

This paper aims to study the effects of the non-stationary soil property on the horizontal bearing capacity of three-dimensional monopile in spatially variable soils. The soil undrained shear strength is assumed to obey lognormal distribution and is simulated as non-stationary random fields. The mean value of the undrained shear strength linearly increases with depth, while the standard deviation keeps constant. The random finite-element method is applied to analyze the reliability of the bearing capacity. The influence of the correlations and non-stationary property on the mean and coefficient of variation of the bearing capacity are discussed. It is found that the correlation distance has no obvious effect on the bearing capacity and the bearing capacity increases with the increase of non-stationary coefficient. The results can guide the reliability-based design of horizontally loaded piles embedded in spatially variable soil.