Abstract: Aiming to investigate the ground surface vibration during pile driving with resonance-free technology, a continuous vibratory pile driving model was established by using the finite difference program FLAC^3D. The density scaling method was introduced to eliminate the effect of time consuming due to the excessive elastic modulus of the model pile. The numerical results were compared to the field test data in literature, and then the influence of exciting force amplitude and vibrating frequency on ground surface vibration, was investigated. The results show that:The density scaling method can effectively increase the simulation efficiency, in which the calculation time for penetrating simulated 7.0 times pile diameter (4.9 m) is around 12.0 h, and there is an acceptable agreement between the numerical result and the field measurement; Additionally, the ground surface vibrations are influenced by the exciting force amplitude and the vibrating frequency mainly in the near field (horizontal distance less than 5.0 times pile diameter); Corresponding to the peak ground surface vibration, the critical penetration depth increases first with the horizontal distance and then tends to almost a steady value; Compared to the exciting force amplitude, the vibrating frequency can influence the critical penetration depth in the far field.

Key words: resonance-free vibratory pile driving, density scaling method, numerical simulation, FLAC^3D, ground vibration tests