Settlement prevision of piles under vertical load

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This paper presents a simplified non-linear method to predict the behaviour of a single pile and/or a pile group under vertical loads. The evaluation of the non-linear settlement is based on an incremental procedure taking into account the decrease of the stiffness parameters with increase of the applied load. The solution, derived first for a single pile, was extended to the case of a pile group, introducing an equivalent pier interacting with the surrounding soil by means of hyperbolic load transfer functions. To take into account group action in the soil–pile interaction, the stiffness of the equivalent pier has been modified and linked to that of the single pile, and a simple expression is also proposed. The numerical results obtained by the proposed method were compared with measurements derived from fullscale load tests on single piles and pile groups, and it has been shown that this procedure can be used successfully for prediction of non-linear pile group settlement. As the method can be easily coded or solved with the aid of a computer spreadsheet, reasonable predictions can be made without expensive and time-consuming analyses.

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