Shaft Resistance and Setup Factors for Piles Jacked in Clay

Installation of a displacement pile often involves complex loading modes that cause substantial changes in the state of the soil surrounding the pile. When a displacement pile is installed in saturated clay, significant excess pore pressure develops. As the excess pore pressure dissipates over time, the effective stresses in the soil surrounding the pile and the pile capacity increase. This paper investigates jacking of piles into clay using finite-element analysis. A two-surface plasticity-based constitutive model for clays was implemented in the finite-element code Solid Nonlinear Analysis Code. Based on the numerical results, equations are developed for quantifying the effects of undrained and residual shear strength on the shaft resistance of jacked piles in clay. The gain in shaft resistance over time is assessed and setup factors are proposed that can be used to estimate the gain in shaft resistance as a function of time after installation of a jacked pile in clay. Good agreement was obtained between the shaft resistance values calculated with the proposed equations and the data available in the literature.