Soil behavior and pile design: Lesson learned from some prediction events—part 1: Aged and residual soils

Pile design methods generally do not consider phenomena such as aging, cementation and weathering, responsible for the presence of microstructures in the soil surrounding the piles and affecting their performance. Some prediction events involving known structured soils are analyzed taking as a reference the CPT-based SBT classification system recently updated by P.K. Robertson (2016). It is shown that the normalized small-strain rigidity index K*_G can be useful to assess the impact of soil micro-structure on pile capacity.