Laterally loaded tubular piles -: experiments and numerical analyses

According to the current version of the Eurocode 3, buckling analyses must be addressed in the design of tubular piles. Unfortunately, the state of the art does not allow the designer to take into consideration the presumably beneficial constraining effects provided by the soil surrounding the tubes. As a result, the verification is too conservative. Within the framework of an improved buckling analysis, experimental and numerical investigations of a laterally loaded pile were conducted. In this paper, the results provided by several numerical models are compared to experimental data. The comparison revealed that simple models provide fairly good results and can be used to design the investigated case.