ABSTRACT
This paper investigates performance of pressed-in piles in saturated clay ground under isolated (SP) condition and pile group (PG) condition via both experimental and numerical methods. In the experiments, static load test (SLT) was conducted on one SP immediately and on another SP and PGs 24 hrs after the installation to investigate the consolidation effect on the pile capacity. The numerical analyses were conducted following the procedure of the model tests using PLAXIS 3D. The constitutive soil model called “soft soil creep model” was employed to describe the soil behaviors with parameters mainly obtained from laboratory element tests. The effect of the pile installation process on the ground stresses is simulated by cylindrical expansion. Both the measured and calculated results indicate that the ground consolidation significantly increases pile capacity, and the simulations results show a good agreement with the experimental results in terms of initial stiffness and pile shaft resistance.
