Pile Driving Analysis for Pile Design and Quality Assurance

Driven piles are commonly used in foundation engineering. The most accurate measurement of pile capacity is achieved from measurements made during static load tests. Static load tests, however, may be too expensive for certain projects. In these cases, indirect estimates of the pile capacity can be made through dynamic measurements. These estimates can be performed either through pile driving formulae or through analytical methods, such as the Case method. Pile driving formulae, which relate the pile set per blow to the capacity of the pile, are frequently used to determine whether the pile has achieved its design capacity. However, existing formulae have numerous shortcomings. These formulae are based on empirical observations and lack scientific validation. This report details the development of more accurate and reliable pile driving formulae developed from advanced one-dimensional FE simulations. These formulae are derived for piles installed in five typical soil profiles: a floating pile in sand, an end‐bearing pile in sand, a floating pile in clay, an end‐bearing pile in clay and a pile crossing a normally consolidated clay layer and resting on a dense sand layer. The proposed driving formulae are validated through well-documented case histories of full-scale instrumented driven piles. The proposed formulae are more accurate and reliable on average than other existing methods for the case histories considered in this study. This report also discusses the development of a pile driving control system, a fully integrated system developed by Purdue that can be used to collect, process, and analyze data to estimate the capacities of piles using the Case method and the pile driving formulae developed at Purdue.