A growing number of civil engineering projects are utilizing steel piles driven into rock where a significant portion of the pile capacity is derived from the shaft resistance. Despite the growing number of projects utilizing the technology, little to no guidance is offered in the literature as to how the shaft resistance is to be calculated for such piles. A database has been compiled for driven piles that penetrate rock. The database consists of 42 pile load tests of which a majority are steel H-piles. The objective of this paper is to present the state of practice for estimating the shaft resistance of driven piles that penetrate rock in the context of the developed database. Pile capacities calculated using the state of practice are then compared to load test data from two well-documented case studies.
John Barrett, P.E. and Luke J. Prendergast, Ph.D.
Keywords: driven piles, rock socket, weak rock
Publisher: DFI