Following comments from Stephen on LatPile 1.03 I have modified the code so that if the specified Soil Properties range includes lines 8 and 9 (for specified effective depths at the top of each layer), but these lines are blank, the effective depths are calculated by the program, rather than being set to zero. The revised files may be downloaded from LatPilePY.zip, including full open source code.
The spreadsheet provides User Defined Functions to carry out the analysis of vertical piles under lateral load, following the methods described in the COM624 Manual. See LatPilePY 1.02 for more details of the spreadsheet content and background.
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Could you please consider including option for ‘Weak Rock’ as per COM624 Manual as well. Next update could be fixed headed pile.
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I continue to struggle with using LatPile, in that for some reason there is a combination of total segment length and segment division that causes the function to “blow up.” I’m not sure what the pattern is, though I’m sure if I messed with it enough I could figure it out.
Have you noticed this yet?
Is there a fix or workaround?
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I hadn’t noticed this.
If you could send an example to my gmail account (dougaj4) that would be helpful.
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Hi,
Thanks for your work on this.
I’m just trying to get started using OpenOffice, but am getting a lot of #MACRO? errors.
Any ideas if there is a workaround ?
Also is it going to be straightforward to specify a steel only tubular pile ?
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cumfy – As far as I know OpenOffice will not run VBA, so the spreadsheet won’t work. Unfortunately the object model in OpenOffice Basic is very different to VBA, and converting all the macros would be a difficult job.
Steel piles should be no problem though. Just specify the diameter and stiffness.
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Hi Doug, Thank you very much for this spreadsheet and the VBA that runs it!
I noticed that we have strange results when the density of a layer is reduced due to the presence of groundwater. I have so far been using the effective density of the soil for the SoilData table. I usually split the layers at the groundwater table so I can input the correct densities above and below this line.
When this is done in a granular layer with otherwise consistent properties (phi and Ki constant), the soil resistance actually increases immediately below the groundwater table. It seems this happens because the effective depth is based on the effective vertical stress divided by the much lower density of the water-bearing layer. This results in artificially high soil resistance values, in my opinion. I have reviewed your code to see if I could add a “cap” on the effective depth where this is the case (so I could limit the effective depth to the actual depth where this occurs), but this does not match the COM624P results. I think I get the best match for these soil parameters when I input the total density of the soil rather than the effective density. Is this how you intended the input to work? Does the program subtract out the weight of the water?
Thanks,
Frank
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Frank – thanks for the feedback.
I’ll have to do some investigation. I’ll et back to you as soon as I have an answer.
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Hi Doug, If it helps I can send you the input information where I discovered the behavior. For this location I had sand over clay with the water table about halfway down the sand. I think that should give you a similar response.
Frank Voss, S.E. (Illinois) GRC Engineering, Inc. 5544 W 147th Street Oak Forest, Illinois 60452 Ph: 708-489-0400 Fx: 708-489-9380
http://www.grceng.com
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I cannot find an option to allow for fixed pile heads to be used in the spreadsheet. Am I missing something? If not, is there an easy way to include this?
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There is nothing built in, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to add something. I will have a look when I have time.
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Cool. I didn’t expect a reply so soon when the last thread entry was 6 years ago, so thanks. Great website BTW.
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Hi, just following up on this, is there a new update to consider fixed pile heads so rotational angle at the top is zero? i would expect the p-y springs are different between fixed and free head. thanks
regards,
EMA
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as a quick workaround, i was thinking of applying a moment load such that the slope at the top would become zero, maybe set a goal-seek function. if i recall, you can just get the slope by getting the difference of the deflection values over their increment depth, but this is limited to the number of finite differences.
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It is some time since I did any work on this, and I’m not likely to have time to do anything much in the near future, but the approach suggested by totallyrebel66c1f616a2 should work.
In any convenient cell, you could just find the difference in the deflections in the top two output rows and multiply that by a large number (say 1 million) and then use Goalseek to adjust the input moment to make that value close to zero. That will be an approximation to the slope at the top of course, but the whole process is full of approximations, and this one should make comparatively little difference. You can increase the number of subdivisions to see how much difference that makes.
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