New Design Method for Pile Group under Vertical Load

연직하중을 받는 무리말뚝의 새로운 설계 방법

Current design of pile group is based on the estimation of the overall bearing capacity of a pile group from that of a single pile using a group efficiency. However, the behaviors of a pile group are influenced by various factors such as method of pile installation, pile-soil-pile interaction, cap-soil-pile interaction, etc. Thus it is practically impossible to take into account these factors reasonably with the only group efficiency, In this paper, a new method for the design of pile groups is proposed, where the significant factors affecting the behavior of a pile group are considered separately by adopting several efficiencies. Furthermore, in the proposed method, the load transfer characteristics of piles and the difference of pile behaviors with respect to the pile locations in group can be taken into account. The efficiencies for the method are determined using the settlement failure criterion, which is consistent with the concept of allowable settlement for structures. The efficiencies calculated from the results of existing model tests are presented, and the bearing capacity of a pile group in the other model test is calculated and compared with that from the test result, to verify the validity of the proposed method.