Evaluation of vertical effective stress and pile tension capacity in sands considering scour-hole dimensions

摘要

Evaluation of vertical effective stress of soils around piles is essential to calculation of pile capacities. However, the widely-used design manuals such as FHWA and API recommend different methods for calculating the vertical effective stress under scour conditions, which thus lead to different calculations of pile capacities. This paper was to evaluate the suitability of the existing methods and the proposed analytical solution for estimation of pile tension capacity by comparing them with FE analyses under different scour-hole dimensions. Based on the comparisons, recommendations were developed for selecting an appropriate method to calculate pile tension capacity under different scour-hole conditions.