Soil Profiles

Soil profiles are vertical columns through the ground which are separated into levels of strata. A new table is created for each soil profile.

Layers must be entered in order of decreasing level.

The lateral extent of each soil profile is specified later as a soil zone.

Definition

Name

The name is a convenient way of identifying a particular soil profile.

Levels

The levels are defined in terms of the level at top of each stratum and the number of intermediate displacement levels.

Displacement levels sub-divide each layer of soil into a number of sub-layers. For example the specification of two intermediate displacement levels will divide the layer of soil into three sub-layers.

This also defines the number of stress calculation points, with depth, for the Boussinesq solution. The stresses are calculated at the centre of each sub-layer.

Soil Material Properties

The basic soil properties are the Young’s modulus & Poisson’s ratio. Where non-linear behaviour is required a non-linear soil curve can be assigned to individual layers of strata.

The pile-soil interaction property allows the selection of a pile-soil interaction property to be associated with each layer of a soil profile.

Notes

The number of displacement levels calculated is determined as the larger of:

a user-specified number () given for each soil layer

a generated number () taken from the Maximum Allowable Ratio () between values of Young’s modulus ().

The value of is calculated by

So for the example illustrated above, if

The value of is always taken as the next lowest integer.

The value of is normally sufficiently accurate for most problems.