A practical design method for energy piles incorporating thermal–mechanical soil–structure interaction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Energy piles are a dual-purpose geostructure system designed to serve both as load-bearing foundations and as a means of utilizing geothermal energy for heating and cooling buildings. Due to their dual function, the behavior of energy piles under temperature variation at the pile–soil interface is significantly more complex than that of traditional piles. This study proposes a unified method for predicting the load–settlement behavior of traditional and energy piles, formulated through a cubic equation that integrates end-bearing hardening, skin-friction softening, and a modified effective stress theory accounting for particle contact area evolution. Unlike existing approaches, the proposed method uniquely separates end-bearing and skin-friction resistances and captures the coupled thermal-mechanical effects at the soil–pile interface, including both resistance gains and losses due to heating or cooling. Validation against interface shear tests and full-scale field measurements confirms the accuracy and robustness of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed framework significantly improves load–settlement predictions and provides a physically consistent and practical tool for energy pile design under varying thermal and mechanical loads. The findings also highlight that temperature effects on energy pile resistance vary with soil conditions. Heating can increase resistance via pile expansion, radial thermal stress, higher particle contact, and friction angle. Conversely, it may reduce resistance due to thermally induced excess pore-water pressure, lower overconsolidation, total stress reduction, decreased stiffness, and cohesion loss. These opposing mechanisms highlight the complex, site-specific thermomechanical behavior of energy piles. Considering microstructural evolution and thermal-softening effects is necessary to enhance the predictive capabilities for pile performance in complex operational environments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".