Lateral Load Capacity and Passive Resistance of Full-Scale Pile Group and Cap

Static and dynamic (statnamic) lateral load tests were performed on a full-scale 3 × 3 pile group driven in saturated low-plasticity silts and clays. The 324-mm outside diameter steel pipe piles were attached to a reinforced concrete pile cap (2.74 m square in plan and 1.21 m high), which created an essentially fixed-head end constraint. A gravel backfill was compacted in place on the back side of the cap. Lateral resistance was therefore provided by pile-soil-pile interaction as well as by base friction and passive pressure on the cap. In this case, passive resistance contributed about 40 percent of the measured static capacity. The measured resistance was compared with that computed by several techniques. The log-spiral method provided the best agreement with measured resistance. Estimates of passive pressure computed using the Rankine or GROUP p-y curve methods significantly underestimated the resistance, whereas the Coulomb method overestimated resistance. The wall movement required to fully mobilize passive resistance in the dense gravel backfill was approximately 0.06 times the wall height, which is in good agreement with design recommendations. The p-multipliers developed for the free-head pile group provided reasonable estimates of the pile-soil-pile resistance for the fixed-head pile group. Default p-multipliers in the program GROUP led to a 35 percent overestimate of pile capacity. Overall dynamic resistance was typically 100 to 125 percent higher than static; however, dynamic passive pressure resistance was over 200 percent higher than static.