Statnamic Lateral Load Testing and Analysis of a Drilled Shaft in Liquefied Sand Statnamic Lateral Load Testing and Analysis of a Drilled Shaft in Liquefied Sand

by Bowles, Seth I

Three progressively larger statnamic lateral load tests were performed on a 2.59 m diameter drilled shaft foundation after the surrounding soil was liquefied using down-hole explosive charges. An attempt to develop p-y curves from strain data along the pile was made. Due to low quality and lack of strain data, p-y curves along the test shaft could not be reliably determined. Therefore, the statnamic load tests were analyzed using a ten degree-of-freedom model of the pile-soil system to determine the equivalent static load-deflection curve for each test. The equivalent static load-deflection curves had shapes very similar to that obtained from static load tests performed previously at the site. The computed damping ratio was 30%, which is within the range of values derived from the log decrement method.

The computer program LPILE was then used to compute the load-deflection curves in comparison with the response from the field load tests. Analyses were performed using a variety of p-y curve shapes proposed for liquefied sand. The best agreement was obtained using the concave upward curve shapes proposed by Rollins et al. (2005) with a p-multiplier of approximately 8 to account for the increased pile diameter. P-y curves based on the undrained strength approach and the p-multiplier approach with values of 0.1 to 0.3 did not match the measured load-deflection curve over the full range of deflections. These approaches typically overestimated resistance at small deflections and underestimated the resistance at large deflections indicating that the p-y curve shapes were inappropriate. When the liquefied sand was assumed to have no resistance, the computed deflection significantly overestimated the deflections from the field tests.