Time-Harmonic Response of an Elastic Pile in a Radially Inhomogeneous Poroelastic Medium

The time-harmonic response of an elastic pile embedded in a radially inhomogeneous poroelastic medium and subjected to a torsional loading is studied in the present article. In engineering practice, the surrounding soil may be weakened due to the disturbance effect caused by pile driving. To simulate the weakened surrounding soil, a boundary zone model with the complex shear modulus of the inner disturbed soil changing in a parabolic form along the radial direction is proposed. In view of the axis-symmetric deformation of the surrounding soil under torsional load, the equation of motion of the saturated soil is solved in the cylindrical coordinate system. The vibration displacement and shear stress solutions for the inner disturbed soil are gained by expanding the displacement as a power series, and those for the outer undisturbed soil are obtained by solving the partial differential equation. By virtue of continuity conditions at the interface between inner and outer soil regions, the torsional impedance of the radially inhomogeneous soil is solved. Then, via the boundary and continuity conditions of the pile-soil system, the twist angle and torque of the pile are obtained in the frequency domain. Finally, selected numerical results are conducted to investigate the influence of the material damping, softening degree, and softening range of the inner soil on the distribution of the twist angle and torque of the pile along the depth direction.