This was a Joint Industry Project (JIP) consisting of the MMS and four industry participants. The objective of this study was to develop engineering guidelines to verify the holding capacity of a pile foundation for an offshore structure subject to a strong earthquake ground motions. The project simulated the response of axially-loaded piles in a specially designed test pit that allows actual data from recorded earthquakes to be used as forcing functions. The concern is if the seismic motion produces loss of capacity of the pile foundation during or after a period of strung-ground shaking. A series of controlled laboratory tests will be conducted on model pile segments that are loaded with a static uplift bias and that are simultaneously subject to seismic excitation through the soil. The ground acceleration time histories will be from the SEMS unit in Project No. 68.
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