Mechanism and assessment of interface shear between steel pipe pile and sand

Abstract

Open-ended steel pipe piles are now widely used as the foundations of bridges. The pile-soil interface behavior is of particular interest in granular soils, because the shaft friction plays an important role in resisting the applied load. Rational design of the shaft capacity depends on a good understanding of the mechanisms of interface shear during pile installation and static loading. There are two new CPT-based methods that are able to take into account the effects of friction fatigue and soil plugging. An improvement is made in this paper to consider the influence of plugging degree on the soil-squeezing ratio which is closely related to the radial effective stress and consequently the shaft capacity. The modified design framework shows better agreement with the field measurements of two instrumented piles than the two existing methods.