Behavior of axially loaded pile groups driven in clayey silt

This paper presents a case history describing measurements made during the installation and load testing of groups of five, closely spaced, precast concrete piles in a soft clay-silt. The test results extend the presently limited set of reported high-quality data for pile groups at field scale and allow assessment of the reliability of existing numerical and analytical predictive approaches. Full scale maintained compression and tension load tests on groups as well as tests on single (reference) piles and an individual test on a pile within a pile group enable the effects of multiple pile installations and interaction between piles under load to be assessed. The results are compared with existing simple methods of pile group analysis and with other case histories reporting results on small pile groups. A simple expression to evaluate pile group stiffness efficiency is proposed.