Elastic buckling loads of partially embedded piles in cohesive soil

Buckling of piles may play an important role in the pile’s design especially for piles that are partially embedded in soil or when the upper layers of the fully embedded piles are loose or weak soils. In this paper, the elastic stability of partially embedded piles subjected to axial force is developed considering all the parameters that may be affecting the buckling load. These parameters are the ratio of the embedded length to the pile length, the elastic modulus of the soil, the pile overall length, and the flexural stiffness of pile that represents the cross section of the pile and its material. Both of the methods of finite element and the minimum potential energy are performed to obtain the buckling loads and then the effective length of the considered pile. The soil is considered as a continuous elastic medium that is replaced by many equally spaced elastic supports of equal rigidity in the finite element modelling. The numerical results are presented in charts to clarify the effect of each parameter on the effective length coefficient of the considered piles. The results of the coefficient of effective length that obtained by the energy technique and the finite element method are also compared in this paper.