Soil compacting displacements for two jacked piles considering shielding effects

Shielding effects have a significant influence on the estimation of soil displacements for jacked piles, which have received minimal attention in previous studies. To include the shielding effects, a novel model was established for the soil compacting displacements of two jacked piles based on the strain path method and the source–sink method. The corresponding closed-form analytical expressions were also derived. Soil compacting displacements were calculated using the proposed method and the previous method, which disregard the shielding effects. The results showed that the soil displacements obtained based on the shielding effects are larger than those obtained when the effects are disregarded in the frontal direction, whereas the opposite results are obtained in the dorsal direction. The shielding effects have significant influence on the soil displacements in the frontal direction and those in the dorsal direction. Consequently, shielding effects should be included in the calculations of soil compacting displacements in the frontal and dorsal directions. An in situ test was also performed to investigate the reasonability of the proposed approach. Computed displacements were compared with the measured data. The results showed that the proposed model effectively predicts practical displacements, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed model. Further research is needed to verify the practicality of the described method.