ABSTRACT
The steel sheet piles, which have long been used for temporary retaining structures, are recently being applied to non-temporary structures such as coastal levees, railway bridge foundations and others. However, the number of load tests on the sheet piles conducted so far is limited, and their design methods seem to have room for sophistication. In addition, the installation methods have some influence on their performance. This paper focuses on the installation method of the “Press-in with Auger” (PA) which can be applied to hard ground conditions with SPT N being greater than 50. In PA, a sheet pile is penetrated into the ground together with an auger device, and then the auger device alone is extracted while the soil is refilled. In this research, the full-scale installation tests and the static load tests were conducted at two filed testing sites having different ground conditions, to investigate the vertical and horizontal resistance of PA sheet piles. The results showed that the vertical and horizontal capacity were dependent on the refilling condition. Tin addition, the axial jacking force in the termination was suggested to correlate with the vertical and horizontal capacity, reflecting the inhomogeneity of the ground.
