Pile Base and Shaft Capacity under Various Types of Loading

Pile bearing capacity is usually understood as the sum of the bearing capacities of the pile’s base and shaft. Nevertheless, the behaviour of the pile base and shaft can be different, depending on what testing method is used for the evaluation of the bearing capacity. In this paper, three different methods of pipe pile testing are introduced, which make it possible to evaluate the pile base and shaft bearing capacities. On the basis of the tests conducted on a laboratory scale and numerical simulations performed with the finite element method, different approaches to bearing capacity evaluation have been compared. As a result, some similarities and differences between the applied methods are presented.