Thermo-Pile, is based on a discretization of the pile in a number of segments. It enables to consider various soil layers, as well as the variation of the soil properties and temperature with depth. An iterative procedure (finite difference scheme) allows quantifying the thermal strains and the associated additional efforts when the pile is subjected to both axial mechanical loading and temperature changes. The procedure has been coded in the Java language. The numerical tool is on the form of an interactive application with pop-up menus and windows for input data. Temperatures resulting from energy design of the heat-exchanger pile system can be used as input parameters of the present numerical tool. The calculation can be directly run and the results (stored in text files) can be visualized on various graphs plotted automatically, showing in particular the mobilized friction (with respect to the soil bearing capacity), the stresses in the pile (with respect to the pile structural resistance) and the deformations, for a given thermal loading.

Additional Info

  • Software: Thermo-Pile
  • Developer: Laboratory of Soil Mechanics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne
  • Platform: Windows
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