Single Piles and Pile Groups Under Lateral Loading

The complexities of designing piles for lateral loads are manifold as there are many forces that are critical to the design of big structures such as bridges, offshore and waterfront structures, and retaining walls. The loads on structures should be supported either horizontally or laterally or in both directions and most structures have in common that they are founded on piles. To create solid foundations, the pile designer is driven towards finding the critical load on a certain structure, either by causing overloaded or by causing too much lateral deflection.

This third edition of Single Piles and Pile Groups Under Lateral Loading explores and explains design and analysis procedures for laterally loaded piles and pile groups, accounting for the nonlinear soil resistance, as related to the lateral deflection of the pile. It addresses the analysis of piles of varying stiffness installed into soils and rock formations with a variety of characteristics, accounting for the axial load at the top of the pile and for the rotational restrain of the pile head. The presented method using load-transfer functions is currently applied in practice by thousands of engineering offices in the world. Moreover, various experimental case design examples are given to complement theory. The rich list of relevant publications will serve the user for further reading.

Numerous developments have taken place in the years since the second edition was published. Hence, new features in this third edition have been added, and it includes new chapters on p-y criteria for crushable soils and rock formations, and a chapter on new challenges in analysis and design of monopiles for offshore wind turbine foundations and drilled piers with large-diameters. Additional subjects treated include updated group reduction factors on the behavior of pile groups with a large number of piles, and the substructure method which is used in current engineering practices for laterally-loaded piles under dynamic loading.

Designed as a textbook for senior undergraduate/graduate student courses in pile engineering and foundation engineering and related subject areas, this third edition of Single Piles and Pile Groups Under Lateral Loading is also aimed at professionals in civil and mining engineering and in applied earth sciences.

Dr. Lymon C. Reese (1917-2009), Nasser I. Al Rashid Chair Emeritus and Professor of Civil Engineering, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, was Chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering from 1965 until 1972, Associate Dean of the College from 1972 until 1979, and one of the nation’s most influential experts on laterally loaded piles and drilled-shaft foundations. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1975 for “contributions in geotechnical engineering and education.” He was the author of more than 150 technical papers.

Emeritus Professor William Van Impe received his MSc and PhD degree in civil engineering at the Ghent University in Belgium where he has been professor of Geotechnics since 1982 and full professor since 1991. Prof. Van Impe has been an emeritus professor since March 2011 but remains active as a consultant and as manager of AGE bvba. He has been also a full professor at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. He has a 35+ years long career in geotechnics.

He is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences. He was elected Vice-President for Europe of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE) in 1994, World President of ISSMGE in 2001 and the President of the umbrella society of the 3 geo-engineering sister societies FedIGS (Federation of the International Geo-Engineering Societies) in 2008. His main field of experience is deep foundations, ground improvement and soil parameter analysis, currently dealing mostly with crushable soils.

Dr. Shin-Tower Wang is the president of Ensoft, Inc./Lymon C. Reese & Associates, in Austin, Texas. He is a registered professional engineer in the State of Texas, with over 40 years of experience in foundation engineering. He has considerable expertise in pile/drilled-pier foundations and soil‑structure‑interaction analyses. He has engaged in numerous consulting projects in deep foundations, especially for offshore platforms, large-scale wind farms, long-span bridges, ports and container terminators in the U.S. and abroad. He is the author/coauthor of one text book and over fifty technical papers.