FIELD STUDIES OF AN INSTRUMENTED MODEL PILE IN CLAY by MLR. COOP and C.P. WROTH Report No. OUEL 1763/89 University of Oxford Department of Engineering Science Parks Road Oxford OXI 3P5 UK. Tel. (0865) 273000FIELD STUDIES OF AN INSTRUMENTED MODEL PILE IN CLAY M.R.COOP and C.P.WROTH SYNOPSIS an instrumented model pile was used to investigate the fundamental behaviour of driven cylindrical steel piles, in clay soils. Data are described from two test-bed sites, one with heavily overconsolidated clay, and one with normally consolidated. ‘These confirm that a residual shear surface is formed adjacent to the pile shaft during installation Comparisons with other site investigation data and cavity expansion theoretical predictions suggest that stress relief immediately behind the pile tip during installation gives rise to total radial stress and pore pressure measurements on the shaft which are lower than this simple model predicts. However, the data did indicate that the radial effective stress might be successfully predicted During reconsolidation, the radial effective stress drops initially, followed by a slow recovery, which was insufficient in the two clays investigated for the final value to reach that during installation Upon undrained loading, the clay adjacent to the pile did not reach a critical state as many current theories assume, since failure occurred on the residual surface created during installation. The generation of, negative excess pore pressures on the shear surface during undrained loading caused an increase in the radial effective stress. In the normally consolidated clay this was solely responsible for the large set- up of pile shaft capacity by comparison with that during installation The same capacity increase way not be seen in these clays if loading were drained. INTRODUCTION The instrumented model pile (IMP) was developed at Oxford University with the intention of investigating the fundamental behaviour of piles in clay. The three phases of the performance of a pile; (1) installation , (2) reconsolidation and (3) loading, were each studiedseparately. Both theoretical work and field trials were undertaken at four test bed sites Data from two of these are described in this paper, one with stiff overconsolidated clay and the other with normally consolidated estuarine clay. The theoretical work has largely concentrated on the first phase, and for simplicity has considered the behaviour of solid cylindrical driven piles. Carter, Randolph & Wroth (Refs. 1, 2, 3 and 4) idealised the soil movements during the installation of such a pile as purely radial straining. Their series of papers used numerical and analytical methods to investigate predicted installation stresses from undrained cylindrical cavity expansion ‘The cavity expansion radial effective stress prediction arises simply from the assumptions that the soil adjacent to the pile shaft is at a critical state under plane strain conditions with a radial major principal stress, and also from the adoption of a Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion ofp = [1 + 3M] su9 a) where o’; is the installation radial effective stress M is the critical state line gradient suo is the initial undrained shear strength of soil The following modified form of Gibson and Anderson's (Ref. 5) cavity expansion equation was used to give similar pore pressures to those predicted numerically: Ug + (Po’ ~ Pf") + Suoln(G/suo) @) where ug is the pore pressure on shaft during installation ug is the initial insicu pore pressure Po! is the initial mean normal effective stress pe’ is the mean normal effective stress at failure G is the shear modulus of soil ‘The second term represents the change in the mean normal effective stress as the soil is sheared to failure and the third is the increase in