Friction Bearing Design of Steel H-Piles: Fid-Bau Portal

Friction Bearing Design of Steel H-Piles

J. H. Long / M. Maniaci

Improved methods for the design and construction of pile foundations can reduce significantly the cost of installation and materials by requiring fewer or shorter piles, and by providing better information on the resistance of the pile during driving. However, some of these methods may require greater computational effort, expense, and time to determine pile capacities more accurately. There are additional concerns that steel H-piles that act primarily in friction may exhibit different behavior than other piles. The objective of this study is to develop better procedures for predicting the axial capacity of driven piles in general, with an additional objective to determine if H-piles require special consideration. This objective was addressed by: (1) collecting, studying, and analyzing data collected on pile driving, and (2) comparing several methods for predicting the axial capacity of piles with several predictive methods such as the Engineering News formula, the Gates formula, WEAP, the Measured Energy (ME) approach, PDA, and CAPWAP. Methods for predicting the axial capacity of piles are compared with results of full-scale load tests from database collections and from load tests conducted in Jacksonville, Illinois. The purpose of this project was to collect and analyze information on axial capacity of piles, to provide a means to assess the methods' accuracy, and to determine factors of safety appropriate for each predictive method. The predictive methods are ranked in terms of accuracy and efficiency for determining pile capacity.