Vertical Loading Test of Large Diameter Steel Pipe Pile
The Tokyo Port Seaside Road has been designed so that the Tokyo Coastal Highway Bridge will cross over Channel No. 3 of the port. At this site, various pile loading tests, including static axial compressive load tests, were carried out. In this series of pile loading tests, the diameter of the piles was 1500 mm and embedded lengths were more than 70 m. As there were two possible bearing layers, static pile loading tests were conducted in two piles embedded in different layers. One possible bearing layer was gravely layer located in the depth from 70 m to 77 m and the other layer was sandy layer located in the depth from 81 m as shown in Fig.1. In this site, the strength of the gravel layer was larger than that of sandy layer. The loading tests results show that the toe resistance could be divided into the inner friction and the resistance of a pile body. It is also shown that the maximum resistance of a pile body can be reached with a relatively small settlement, whereas a large settlement is required for exhibiting the inner resistance as shown in Fig. 2. In both tests results, the resistance of pile body of the pile embedded in gravel layer was larger than that embedded in sandy layer, but inner friction resistances were similar. These results show that the toe resistance of pile body of steel pipe pile were affected by the soil resistance beneath the pile tip. There were uncertainties to estimate the inner friction of open ended piles.