Professional Documents
Culture Documents
In case of excessive pressure then deep foundations can be used instead of rectangular and
raft foundations. Piles are the appropriate foundations to safely transfer the imposed loads to
the bearing strata. Drilled shafts (reinforced concrete piles) shall be studied in this section.
Axial pile capacity (under both compression and tension), lateral capacity, P-Y and T-Z curves
of the drilled reinforced concrete piles were carried out using ALLPILE v7 software, taking into
consideration the following:
Detailed output design generated by ALLPILE software in graphical format are included in
Appendix D and summarized in Illustration I 7 comprising the following:
In addition to the piles capacities presented above, the working loads should not exceed the
permissible stresses in the concrete itself. Generally, the permissible stresses in the concrete
are taken in the order of 25%Fc to 33%Fc as per BS and AASHTO respectively. Depending
on the diameter, the following maximum loads satisfy the permissible BS stresses criteria in
C30 and C3550 class concrete:
Table 7.5.1: Permissible Stresses in C30 and C35 Class Concrete (BS criteria)
Prior to piles construction, it is highly recommended to carry out static pile load tests on
preliminary test piles. The piles should be fully instrumented with strain gauges.
Instrumentation is needed to establish load distribution along pile length and accordingly
check the calculated skin friction and end bearing pressure values. Final pile design should
be prepared by a specialist/piling contractor prior to construction.
Negative skin friction on pile structural capacity and settlement shall be to be assessed for
piles installed on soft clays. However, the mechanism of negative skin friction on pile is still
not well understood and often various pile design codes/guides provide very different
recommendations on negative skin friction considerations. Some common scenarios of pile
failure due to negative skin friction are:
1. Lightly loaded short piles supporting drains or other light structures in soft clay. In
such cases, the pile may have little resistance left after deduction of negative skin
friction from the pile bearing capacity.
2. Piles supporting bridge abutments in soft soils. As the soft soil beneath the abutment
would settle considerably due to new abutment fill, the settling soils would drag the
abutment piles down resulting in negative skin friction on the piles.
3. Drawdown of water table due to adjacent soil excavation, under-consolidating soils,
and settlement of soils under newly placed fills at a site.
Therefore the encountered soil conditions of the under study area (stiff to hard clays),
negative skin friction scenario is not anticipated and thus its effects were not considered in the
present design.
When drilled shafts are installed in groups, the effect of excavating and concreting boreholes,
adjacent to the drilled shafts already in place, may reduce unit resistance in the soil along the
completed drilled shafts. Therefore, capacities of individual drilled shafts within a group tend
to be lower than the corresponding capacity of an isolated shaft. To account for this, a
reduction coefficient should be applied to the capacity of single piles provided on the
Illustration I 7.
In practice, piles groups having center-to-center spacing (d) above 2.5*D (D is the pile
diameter) are considered to have the same capacity as individual piles. Therefore, the
reduction coefficient is usually applied in cases where d/D is less than or equal to 2.5.
Table 7.5.3: Reduction Coefficient for Pile Capacity due to grouping effect
Group Type Pile Group Shape
d/D = 2.0 d/D = 2.5
The allowable pile capacities for Train A/B area are summarised in the table 7.5.4 below:
Table 7.5.4 Pile Capacities for drilled and grouted Pile for Train A/B Area
LATERAL-FREE LATERAL-FIXED
AXIAL HEAD HEAD
340 12 670 12
10 650 2 6 370
250 6 490 6
600
340 12 670 12
15 1350 5 6 520
250 6 490 6
Earth pressure coefficients are presented in the following table without considering any friction
between soil and retaining structures. Jackys formula was used to derive K0. The
recommended coefficients of lateral earth pressures corresponding to each friction angle are
summarized in the following table.
Mixtures of stiff to
very stiff CLAY and
medium dense to 30 0.50 0.33 3.00
Medium dense
37 0.40 0.25 4.02
GRAVEL