Pile Buck-SPW911

[tre5205]

The pile buck software SPW911 seems to be okay. Does anyone have a workaround to placing a lateral load onto the pile? Unfortunately it appears that it only handles the earth pressure internally and one can't add an additional loading. This seems to limit what this program can do.

 

[PEinc]

I suggest you buy a different program.

http://www.PeirceEngineering.com

 

[tre5205]

What would you recommend? I know Ensoft has PYWALL.

 

[PEinc]

I am not a big proponent of sheeting design programs that depend highly on soil properties that no one accurately knows. It's rare enough to see geotech reports that give test-based unit weight, phi, and cohesion, let alone soil spring constants.

While I have SPW911, I do not use it. I prefer a design program that designs the wall similar to how it would be designed by hand calculations using either triangular earth pressures or empirical pressure distributions. I like CivilTech's Shoring Suite. (No, I do not work for CivilTech or sell their programs.) Just because a computer program is capable of performing highly sophisticated theoretical calculations doesn't mean it is better or even needed.

http://www.PeirceEngineering.com

 

[FixedEarth]

If you have the foundation texts by Bowles, Teng, Tscheb0tarriof, Das, they all have a unique method of doing cantilever and anchored sheetpile designs. It may take you few days to do a spreadsheet and you know what all the numbers are. Besides, the software firms have access to these same sources.

Each of the above texts have other papers of interest that will lead you to more case studies. For example, Tschebotarriof, in the late 1940's, did some model studies of sheetpiles and then recommended an earth pressure envelope for cantilever system and one for one level anchor. Blum, in the early 193o's and later in the 1950's did a free cantilever method and also his famous equivalent beam method. Spend some time gathering the above references and you will see it is as simple as analyzing a cantilever beam and a beam with an overhanging support- nothing harder than a Mechanics of Materials class.