Modified Calculation of Pile‐Group Settlement Interaction

Abstract

A procedure that allows for the influence of the greater soil-mass stiffness between piles is described for calculating group settlement interaction factors. For the calculation of the settlement of a pile due to the presence of an adjacent pile, a weighted average of the soil moduli near the pile and between the piles is used with the classical Mindlin equation of elasticity. This procedure leads to decreased interaction between piles, and therefore to smaller group settlement and more uniform distributions of load, than are obtained by the conventional analysis in which the soil-mass modulus is assumed to be equal to the soil modulus near each pile. When applied to a recent series of field tests, the modified procedure is found to predict the group performance more closely than does the conventional procedure.