Bidirectional cell tests on non-grouted and grouted large-diameter bored piles

The 37-storey apartment buildings of the Everrich II project in HoChiMinh City, Vietnam was designed to be supported on a piled foundation consisting of bored piles assigned a 22-MN working load per pile. The foundation design included performing bidirectional-cell, static loading tests on four test piles. The soil profile consisted of organic soft clay to about 28 m depth followed by a thick deposit of sandy silt and silty sand with a density that gradually increased with depth from compact to dense, becoming very dense at 65 m depth. In March 2010, the test piles, one 1.5-m diameter pile and three 2.0-m diameter piles, were installed to 80 m through 85 m depth and constructed using bucket drill technique with bentonite slurry and a casing advanced ahead of the hole. The bidirectional-cell assemblies were installed at 10 m through 20 m above the pile toes. The piles were instrumented with pairs of diametrically opposed vibrating wire strain-gages at three to four levels below and six to seven levels above the respective cell levels. After completed concreting, the shaft grouting was carried out throughout a 20 m length above the pile toe for the 1.5-m diameter pile and for one of the 2.0-m diameter piles. The static loading tests were performed about 34 through 44 days after the piles had been concreted. The analysis of strain-gage records indicated an average Young’s modulus value of about 25 GPa for the nominal crosssections of the piles. The average unit grouted shaft resistances on the nominal pile diameters were about two to three times larger than the resistance along the non-grouted lengths. The measured load distribution of maximum mobilized shaft resistances corresponded to effective stress proportionality coefficients, ß, of about 0.2 through 0.3. The ultimate shaft resistance for the pile lengths below the bidirectional cells reached an ultimate value after about 8 to 10 mm movement, whereafter the load-movement was plastic. The pile toe stress-movement responses to toe stiffness were soft with no tendency toward an ultimate value.