Construction and Installation of Pile Structures

Typical jacket platform leg after piles installation. 

Lateral loading on the jacket platform can produce high bending stresses in the piles as they emerge from the sleeve. To handle these stresses the wall thickness over a length of pile expected to be above and below the grout packer is increased to resist these stresses. This length is commonly called the heavy wall section. The installation of such piles must be carefully planned, since any delays may be costly. 

Typical for/velocity-time measurement, (a) Onshore and (b) offshore. (After Goble, G.G., Analysis of offshore pile driving—A review, Proceedings of Conference on Geotechnical Practice in Offshore Engineering, ed. S. G. Wright, ASCE, pp. 596-603,1983. Reprinted with permission of ASCE.) 

A drivabilify analysis consisfs of two primary phases (1) a wave equation analysis to generate a curve of fhe sfatic soil resistance at time of driving soil resistance during driving [SRD] versus blow count, and (2) an analysis to produce a curve of SRD versus depth. 

Two different programs provide the basis of most of the current computer codes used in the analysis of offshore pile-driving problems. The first is a program developed at Texas A M University (Hirsch et al., 1976 Samson et al., 1963). The second is a program called WEAP developed by Goble and Associates under contract with the Federal Highway Administration (Goble and Rausche, 1980). 

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