A laboratory study of Statnamic testing of piles in clay

To gain a better understanding of soil behaviour during Statnamic load testing of piles in clay, model pile load tests have been carried out under different loading regimes. An instrumented model pile has been installed in an instrumented clay bed that has been normally consolidated from a slurry, and whose boundary conditions during are known. The pile load – displacement data clearly show the effects of loading rate and demonstrate that the conventional unloading point method for Statnamic test data analysis requires modification to accommodate these rate effects. The non-linear damping that occurs during loading can be represented by a power law incorporating damping coefficients α and β