A New Approach for Estimating Capacity of Driven Piles in Sand under Tensile Loading

This paper is dedicated to estimate the capacity of tension piles installed by dynamic driving in cohesionless soil. Using a database comprising 23 closed-ended piles, a new design approach for closed-ended piles in sand under tensile loading was developed. The new approach was extended to open-ended piles using three methods and a database comprising 14 open-ended piles. The first method (method 1) is based on a plug indicator which accounts for the effect of incremental filling ratio and vertical effective stress at the pile tip. In the second method (method 2), open-ended pile is transformed to equivalent solid pile (considered as closed-ended pile with equivalent diameter equal to D*). The third method (method 3) is a combination of methods (1) and (2) with the required adjustments. Six independent well-documented full-scale pile load tests collected from literature were used as independent database to examine the validity of the proposed methods. Comparison of predicted capacities using the three proposed methods for open-ended piles with measured values for the collected six field cases showed good agreement when using the first method and suggested that this method had sound theoretical physical meaning.