Inflight installation of a jacked pile group for modelling installation effects




Inflight installation of a jacked pile group for modelling installation effects


An in-depth understanding of the performance of piled foundations due to lateral loading is relevant for the reliable design of new structures and for the assessment of the stability and serviceability of existing infrastructure.

Available investigations on laterally loaded pile groups and current empirical or analytical methods mainly focus on bored piles. Opposite to that, there is very limited knowledge about the performance of displacement pile groups although it can be expected that their behaviour is significantly influenced by the installation effects, like the change of stress-state and soil density. For realisation, tests on groups of 9 piles, installed as bored-piles and as displacement piles, are performed at Deltares Centrifuge, to picture the impact of installation effects on the lateral load-displacement behaviour of the pile groups.

Therefore, the earth pressure was measured directly on the pile surface by small earth pressure cells and the lateral load versus pile head deflection was measured by strain gauges mounted on the inside of the pile. To model jacked, fixed-headed piles without stopping the centrifuge means that the piles have to be jacked, rigidly fixed and loaded laterally in flight, without stopping in between. If a stop for further installations is needed, this could cause changes of the stress state in the soil as well as for the soil-structure interaction.

In the paper the modelling technique is shown and the output of the centrifuge tests will be presented.



Tobias Schlager; Christian Moormann


5th European Conference on Physical Modelling in Geotechnics (ECPMG2024)



Geotechnical infrastructure



https://doi.org/10.53243/ECPMG2024-90