End-bearing capacity of driven piles in sand using the stress characteristics method: analysis and implementation

Abstract

The method of stress characteristics has been employed to compute the end-bearing capacity of driven piles. The dependency of the soil internal friction angle on the stress level has been incorporated to achieve more realistic predictions for the end-bearing capacity of piles. The validity of the assumption of the superposition principle while using the bearing capacity equation based on soil plasticity concepts, when applied to deep foundations, has been examined. Fourteen pile case histories were compiled with cone penetration tests (CPT) performed in the vicinity of different pile locations. The end-bearing capacity of the piles was computed using different methods, namely, static analysis, effective stress approach, direct CPT, and the proposed approach. The comparison between predictions made by different methods and measured records shows that the stress-level-based method of stress characteristics compares better with experimental data. Finally, the end-bearing capacity of driven piles in sand was expressed in terms of a general expression with the addition of a new factor that accounts for different factors contributing to the bearing capacity. The influence of the soil nonassociative flow rule has also been included to achieve more realistic results.

Analyses of Plane-strain Compression Using the Upper Bound Method

“…Later more related works on the use of upper bound method in some tenacious patterns are reported, notably, the work of Bona (2004), Es-Saheb (2004) and Moller et al (2004), as well as Ebrahimi and Najafizadeh (2004). Also, in the civil engineering field, the upper bound method is widely used in predicting and estimating the loads in the foundations and footings of different shapes, as reported in the last few years, by Zhu and Michalowski (2005), Merifield and Nguyen (2006), Gourvenec et al (2006), Gourvenec (2007), Zhang (2008), Dean (2008) and Yilmaz and Bakir (2009) and most recently by Arabshahi et al (2010), as well as Majidi et al (2011) and Veiskarami et al (2011).…”

Axisymmetric active lateral earth pressure for c- soils using the stress characteristics method

“…This method has been applied in many geotechnical problems, including bearing capacity of foundations [11][12][13][14][15][16] and the active and passive lateral earth pressure [17][18][19][20]. Kumar and Chitikela [18] used the SCM to estimate the seismic passive lateral earth pressure.…”