Title |
Prediction of Ultimate Load of Drilled Shafts Embedded in Weathered Rock by Extrapolation Method |
Keywords |
drilled shaft;extrapolation method;ultimate load prediction;pile loading test;hyperbolic curve method;현장타설말뚝;외삽법;극한하중 예측;말뚝재하시험;쌍곡선 방법 |
Abstract |
In general, a drilled shaft embedded in weathered rock has a large load bearing capacity. Therefore, most of the load tests are performed only up to the load level that confirms the pile design load capacity, and stopped much before the ultimate load of the pile is attained. If a reliable ultimate load value can be extracted from the premature load test data, it will be possible to greatly improve economic efficiency as well as pile design quality. The main purpose of this study is to propose a method for judging the reliability of the ultimate load of piles that is obtained from extrapolated load test data. To this aim, ten static load test data of load-displacement curves were obtained from testing of piles to their failures from 3 different field sites. For each load-displacement curve, loading was assumed as 25%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, and 90% of the actual pile bearing capacity. The limited known data were then extrapolated using the hyperbolic function, and the ultimate capacity was re-determined for each extrapolated data by the Davisson method (1972). Statistical analysis was performed on the reliability of the re-evaluated ultimate loads. The results showed that if the ratio of the maximum-available displacement to the predicted displacement exceeds 0.6, the extrapolated ultimate load may be regarded as reliable, having less than a conservative 20% error on average. The applicability of the proposed method of judgment was also verified with static load test data of driven piles. |