Reliability Evaluation of Extrapolated Failure Load of Drilled Shafts Embedded in Weathered Rock

풍화암에 근입된 현장타설말뚝의 외삽 파괴하중 신뢰성 분석

In general, a drilled shaft embedded in weathered rock has a large load bearing capacity. Therefore, most of the load tests are performed only up to the load level that confirms the pile design load capacity, and stopped much before the failure load of the pile is attained. If a reliable failure load value can be extracted from the premature load test data, it will be possible to greatly improve economic efficiency as well as pile design quality. The main purpose of this study is to propose a standard for judging the reliability of the failure load of piles that is obtained from extrapolated load test data. To this aim, eleven static load test data of load-displacement curves were obtained from testing of piles to their failures from 3 different field sites. For each load-displacement curve, loading was assumed as 25%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, and 90% of the actual pile bearing capacity. The limited known data were then extrapolated using the hyperbolic function, and the failure load was re-determined for each extrapolated data by the ASCE 20-96 method (1997). Statistical analysis was performed on the reliability of the re-evaluated failure loads. The results showed that if the ratio of the maximum-available displacement to the failure-load displacement exceeds 0.6, the extrapolated failure load may be regarded as reliable, having less than a conservative 20% error on average. The applicability of the proposed standard of judgment was also verified with static load test data of driven piles.