Reliability-based load and resistance factor design model for energy piles

Abstract

Energy piles have been popular globally with functions of both pile foundation and ground source heat pumps. Although several researches have been devoted to the probabilistic design and assessment of energy piles, the corresponding procedures are too complicated for engineers. As a simple variant of the reliability-based design method, the load and resistance factor design (LRFD) approach for the geotechnical design of energy piles is presented in this study. Firstly, the load-transfer model for energy piles is developed to investigate the effect of cyclic thermal loading on the pile settlement. Then, the LRFD procedures based on first-order reliability method and target reliability method are implemented into two different constrained nonlinear optimization problems, respectively. The proposed LRFD model for energy piles is demonstrated through an example pile and a series of parametric analyses.

Shallow foundation design: a comparative study of partial safety factors and full probabilistic methods

“…Not only the Czech engineering community has started start to realize this fact, and now we can see more projects dealing with this topic (see e.g. [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] ). The importance of fully probabilistic calculations lies in the rational and mathematically sound consideration of randomness and uncertainty due to a random and uncertain character of inputs to the model of a structure.…”