ABSTRACT
In his 2000 Rankine Lecture, Professor Atkinson has emphasised the importance of considering soil non-linearity in routine design. For pile group problems, this issue has not yet been satisfactorily addressed, and current design practice is still generally based on linear approaches. The main drawback to the application of linear models to pile group problems is that they ignore the non-linear loaddefonnation characteristics of soil and hence misrepresent the forces in piles, specifically by giving higher stresses in group comers. The cost of this in practice is high and there is an urgent need in industry for efficient non-linear analysis methods.
