Study on lateral behavior of digging well foundation with consideration of soil-foundation interaction

Digging well foundation has been widely used in railway bridges due to its good economy and reliability. In other instances, bridges with digging well foundation still have damage risks during earthquakes. However, there is still a lack of knowledge of lateral behavior of digging well foundation considering the soil-foundation interaction. In this study, scaled models of bridge pier-digging well foundation system are constructed for quasi-static test to investigate their lateral behaviors. The failure mechanism and responses of the soil-foundation-pier interaction system are analyzed. The testing results indicate that the digging foundations tend to rotate as a rigid body under cyclic lateral load. Moreover, the depth-width ratio of digging well foundation has a significant influence on the failure mode of the interaction system, especially on the distribution of foundation displacement and the failure of pier. The energy dissipation capacity of the interaction system is discussed by using index of the equivalent viscous damping ratio. The damping varies with the depth-width ratio changing. The equivalent stiffness of soil-digging well foundation-pier interaction system decreases with the increase of loading displacement in a nonlinear manner. The absolute values of the interaction system stiffness are significantly influenced by the depth-width ratio of the foundation.