Theory and  Practice of Pile  Foundations

Over the last 20 years or so, I have witnessed and grown to appreciate the difficulty undergraduate students sometimes have in grasping geotechnical courses. Geotechnical courses have many new concepts and indigestible expressions to initially be memorized. The expressions, which generally originate from advanced elastic mechanics, plastic mechanics, and numerical approaches, are technical and not easily accessible to students. These courses may leave the students largely with fragments of specifications.

This naturally leads the students to have less confidence in their ability to learn geotechnical engineering. To resolve the problem, our research resolution has been to minimize the number of methods and input parameters for each method and to resolve as many problems as possible. We believe this will allow easier access to learning, practice, and integration into further research.

Piles, as a popular foundation type, are frequently used to transfer superstructure load into subsoil and stiff-bearing layer and to transfer impact of surcharge owing to soil movement and/or lateral force into underlying layers. They are installed to cater for vertical, lateral, and/or torsional loading to certain specified capacity and deformation criteria without compromising structural integrity. They are conventionally made of steel, concrete,timber, and synthetic materials (Fleming et al. 2009) and have been used since the Neolithic Age (6,000~7,000 years ago) (Shi et al. 2006). Their use is rather extensive and diverse. For instance, in 2006, ~50 million piles were installed in China, ranging (in sequence of high to low proportion) from steel pipe piles, bored cast-in-place piles, hand-dug piles, precast reinforced concrete piles, pre-stressed concrete pipe piles, and driven cast-in-place piles to squeezed branch piles. These piles, although associated with various degrees of soil displacement during installation, are generally designed using the same methods but with different parameters. It is critical that any method of design should allow reliable design parameters to be gained in a cost-effective manner. More parameters often mean more difficulty in warranting a verified and expeditious design.

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