ABSTRACT
This paper aims to investigate the vertical and horizontal performance of pressed-in sheet piles, focusing on the effect of the installation process. An instrumented pile was installed four times (once as part of a three-wide wall) in sand under varying installation conditions and subjected to vertical and horizontal load tests. A novel liquefiable sand tank was used in which ‘boiling’ of the sand between each pile installation allowed the sand to return to a loose, undisturbed state. In the vertical direction, the performance was found to vary significantly with the installation conditions, and an accurate, straightforward method for assessing the pile capacity retroactively from the installation loads is presented. The horizontal performance was found to be relatively independent of the installation conditions, and a simple modification to the P-y method is proposed to model the behaviour, to account for existing methods being suited to circular rather than flat cross sections.
