Bored pile design in stiff clay I: codes of practice

Abstract

The assessment of the allowable bearing load of bored piles ‘floating' in stiff clay is a standard engineering task. Although the soil mechanics is universal, engineers designing structures in different parts of the world will need to take into account the pertinent codes of practice. It will be helpful to compare such codes, especially in relation to their treatment of uncertainty in the design of bored piles. This paper presents a series of design calculations for a real set of geotechnical data using four international codes of practice: the Australian, American, European and Russian codes. The National Annexes of Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK are used in conjunction with the European code. This selection of countries covers the three Eurocode 7 design approaches (DA1, DA2 and DA3). A non-codified design method is used to provide a base case for comparative purposes with the six codified calculations. A companion paper investigates the issues of soil mechanics in pile design methods, uncertainty in soil parameters and settlement criteria.