BEHAVIOUR OF OPEN AND CLOSED END PILE GROUPS SUBJECTED TO VERTICAL LOADING A Comparative Study

Steel pipe piles are highly durable, provide reliable foundation, have shorter construction period and can be driven into such medium where other piles can’t like boulder medium. Steel pipe piles are economical for long piles into deeps loose soil. Till now most of research has been directed towards the response of individual piles to vertical loads. Both the driving response and static bearing capacity of open-ended piles are affected by the soil plug that forms inside the pile during pile driving. In order to investigate the effect of the soil plug on the static and dynamic response of an open-ended pile and the load capacity of pipe piles in general, field pile load tests were performed on instrumented open- and closed-ended piles driven into sand. For the open-ended pile, the soil plug length was continuously measured during pile driving, allowing calculation of the incremental filling ratio for the pile