Prediction of End Bearing Capacity for Pre-Bored Steel Pipe Piles Using Instrumented Spt Rods

The standard penetration test (SPT) has been widely used because of its usability, economy, and many correlations with soil properties among other factors. In SPT, hammer energy is an important factor to evaluate and calibrate N values. To measure hammer energy, an instrumented SPT rod was developed considering that stress waves transferring on rods during SPT driving are the same as stress waves transferring on piles due to pile driving. Using this idea, an instrumented SPT rod with a pile driving analyzer was applied as a pile capacity prediction tool in this study. In order to evaluate this method, SPT and dynamic cone tests with the instrumented SPT rod were conducted and also 2 pile load tests were performed on pre-bored steel pipe piles at the same test site. End bearings were predicted by CAPWAP analysis on force and velocity waves from dynamic cone penetration tests and SPT. Comparing these predicted end bearings with static pile load tests, a new prediction method of the end bearing capacity using the instrumented SPT rod was proposed.