Response of a scale-model pile group for a jacket foundation of an offshore wind turbine in liquefiable ground during shaking table tests

To investigate the seismic response of a pile group during liquefaction, shaking table tests on a 1/25 scale model of a 2 × 2 pile group were conducted, which were pilot tests of a test project of a scale-model offshore wind turbine with jacket foundation. A large laminar shear box was utilized as the soil container to prepare a liquefiable sandy ground specimen. The pile group model comprising four slender aluminum piles with their pile heads connected by a rigid frame was designed with similitude considerations focusing on soil–pile interaction. The input motions were 2-Hz sinusoids with various acceleration amplitudes. The excess pore water pressure generation indicated that the upper half of the ground specimen reached initial liquefaction under the 50-gal-amplitude excitation, whereas in the 75-gal-amplitude test, almost entire ground was liquefied. Accelerations in soil, on the movable frames composing the laminar boundary of the shear box, and along the pile showed limited difference at the same elevation before liquefaction. After liquefaction, the soil and the movable-frame accelerations that represented the ground response considerably reduced, whereas both the movable frames and the piles exhibited high-frequency jitters other than 2-Hz sinusoid, and meantime, remarkable phase difference between the responses of the pile group and the ground was observed, all probably due to the substantial degradation of liquefied soil. Axial strains along the pile implied its double-curvature bending behavior, and the accordingly calculated moment declined significantly after liquefaction. These observations demonstrated the interaction between soil and piles during liquefaction.