Enhancement of The Behaviour of Laterally Loaded Vertical Piles Embedded in Clayey Soil

Abstract

One of the most important problems is the construction on a soft clay soil, which extends over many areas in Egypt, Construction on a soft clay soil requires the use of deep foundations. In most of the cases the pile lateral capacity isn't satisfied due to the upper soft clay layers. Thus, there is a need to enhance the lateral load behavior of the pile. This paper is to study the enhancement of the lateral behavior of piles by replacing the upper layers of soft clay with dense sand. A series of laboratory tests were conducted on a single pile in soft clay soil. The upper clay layer around the pile was removed and replaced with compacted dense sand and the tests were repeated. The model pile used in this study was made of smooth hollow steel pipe. The outer diameter and wall thickness were 21 and 1.8 mm, respectively. Results indicated that the improvement of laterally loaded pile behavior was found to be strongly dependent on the replaced layer depth and replaced layer extension around the pile in dense sand. Results of experimental investigations were used to extract the lateral load-lateral displacement (P-Δ) curves.

Keywords

• soft clay
• model tests
• laterally loaded pile