Hysteretic behaviors of pile foundation for railway bridges in loess

Pile foundation is widely used for railway bridges in loess throughout northwestern China. Modeling of the loess–pile interaction is an essential part for seismic analysis of bridge with pile foundation at seismically active regions. A quasi-static test is carried out to investigate the hysteretic behaviors of pile foundation in collapsible loess. The failure characteristics of the bridge pile-loess system under the cyclic lateral loading are summarized. From the test results, the energy dissipation, stiffness degradation and ductility of the pile foundation in loess are analyzed. Therefore, a bilinear model with stiffness degradation is recommended for the nonlinearity of the bridge pier-pile-loess system. It can be found that the stiffness of the bridge pier-pile-loess system decreases quickly in the initial stage, and then becomes more slowly with the increase of the displacement ductility. The equivalent viscous damping ratio is defined as the ratio of the dissipated energy in one cycle of hysteresis curves and increases with the lateral displacement.