ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Built Environ.
Sec. Geotechnical Engineering
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Marine Geotechnology and Offshore Structural Systems: Design, Monitoring and PerformanceView all articles
Undrained Capacity of Offshore Axially loaded Piles with the CSUH Model Incorporating Cylindrical Cavity Theory
Provisionally accepted
- 1PowerChina Huadong Engineering Corporation Limited, Hangzhou, China
- 2Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China
- 3Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
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Axially loaded piles are widely employed in deep-water offshore platforms, offshore wind turbine foundations, electrical-transmission towers, and bridge piers, and other structures to support axial loads. This paper presents a semi-analytical solution for predicting the undrained response of axial load piles using the unified hardening model for clays and sands (CSUH), incorporated within the framework of the cylindrical cavity theory. The soil around the pile is idealized as a cylindrical cavity. By combing the stress equilibrium equation, compatibility equation, boundary conditions, and the constitutive model, the soil state around the pile during loading is described as a system of first-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with unknown variables, which are solved as an initial value problem. The derived load-displacement (t-z) curve is then incorporated into the compression differential equation to determine the undrained capacity of the axially loaded piles. The proposed approach is validated with finite-element numerical simulation results. Additionally, results from a centrifuge test and a field test are compared with those predicted by the proposed approach. The comparisons demonstrate that the present approach can accurately predict the undrained load-displacement behavior of axially loaded piles, and capture key phenomena observed in pile tests.
Keywords: axially loaded piles, CSUHmodel, cylindrical cavity theory, offshore, Undrained capacity
Received: 28 Nov 2025; Accepted: 03 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Jia, Fu, Pan and Pang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Li Pang
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