Driven piles design methodology and recommendations

Displacement piles have a dominant share on European‘s construction market and prevalence of bored piles. Given occurring variable geological conditions, the occurrence of anthropogenic layers and the lack of design standards in construction practice in Slovakia this type of piles is slower enforced, even if they have significant advantages over other technologies of construction of piles. The article reports about design practices in the world and in Slovak geotechnical practice by the new knowledge and experience. For driven piles design process is important role of detailed survey, where suitable geotechnical tests of the soil profile similar to installation process are carried out. For this case penetration probing is recommended such as static, standard or dynamic. When various soil profiles acting in top layers, design is little complicated and numerical modelling by finite elements methods can be a good alternative of axial load capacity estimation. The present calculation of bearing capacity of piles based on the Nordlund’s theory or other presented theories are most depended on in situ data precision. Therefore has been presented suitable geotechnical testing method and correlations to obtain continues in situ data – such as static penetration CPT or dynamic penetration DP.