Closure to 'Examining Setup Mechanisms of Driven Piles in Sand Using Laboratory Model Pile Tests' by Z. Zhang and Y. H. Wang

摘要

The writers would like to thank the discussers for their interest in our findings and are grateful for providing important references, i.e., Lim and Lehane (2014a, b, 2015), which unfortunately were not accessible by the writers during the peer review process of this discussed paper. The discussers provided additional evidence from field experiments on instrumented jacked piles (Lim and Lehane 2015) to further support our findings, in line with Axelsson (2000), that the dominant mechanism of pile setup in sand is attributed to the time dependence of the radial effective stress change during shearing or pile loading. The discussers have also referred to the results from laboratory chamber tests (Lim and Lehane 2014b) to show the absence of setup in buried piles. This experimental result not only echoes the general field observations on bored piles (e.g., Chow et al. 1998) but also supports our explanations on the absence of setup offered in the paper.