Settlement’s Prediction of Piles in Tropical Soil

Abstract

The prediction of deep foundation settlements remains challenging due to the scarcityofstudies about it. This paper aimed to evaluate the accuracy of the usage of load transfer methods in predicting the settlement of bored piles in granular soil in Brazil’s Northeast. For this, two small piles were installed and submitted to load tests, a small amount of expansive polystyrene was placed under one of the pile’s tips to evaluate the load distribuition of the elements.. For the settlement’s prediction, methods based on load transfer functions, such as analytical and numerical (using RSPile and UniPile ), were employed. The comparinson of the predicted values with the experimental measurements showed agreement in the elastic zone of soil’s behavior for all the methods. For higher loads, discrepancies occurred. The method proposed by Massad (1992) was the most effective among the used methodologies. Using the mentioned programs, results were close to the experimental values.