Press-in piles, with the advantage of environmental friendliness, are widespread in
geotechnical engineering nowadays. In practice, sometimes piles have to be jacked near asbuilt retaining structures. This may induce extra stress on the retaining structures or excessive movement. In order to ensure the safety of the retaining structures, it is vital to study the effects of pile press-in on adjacent retaining structures. However, it is extremely expensive and time-consuming to conduct a full-scale test to study the effects. Instead, laboratory tests on scaled model were adopted in this research. The most crucial problem for a lab test is that it is extremely difficult to capture the stress distribution acting on the retaining structure of laboratory-scale. A hi-tech tactile pressure sensor makes it possible to measure normal stress with high accuracy for a lab-scale model. In the current tests, the retaining structure was fixed and the additional stress acting on it was studied. By making use of the tactile pressure sensor, a series of lab tests were conducted to obtain the stress distribution information on a fixed retaining wall when a hollow circular steel pile with a diameter of 1.5cm was pressed into standard sand at different distances from the retaining structure. Penetration depth and distance between the pile and retaining structure are two main factors affecting the stress distribution. Therefore influences of these two factors were studied based on the experiment results. Moreover, observations were also made with regards to the vertical and horizontal spread zone of additional stress induced by pile press-in. In the end, limitations of the lab tests were discussed briefly and corresponding improvements were proposed for future research.