A Study of the Ultimate Pile Load Capacity Calculation Methods for Cohesionless Soil

Numerous techniques are available for finding the ultimate load carrying capacity of piles which includes the static methods, dynamic methods, in-situ penetration tests and the pile load tests. Of these, the static methods, in-situ penetration tests and the pile load tests gives the most reliable results with the pile load tests being the most prevalent of all three. Although there are a number of methods to analytically find out the load carrying capacity, these are often based partly on soil and rock mechanics and partly on empirical methods based on experiments. In this study, the different methods have been analyzed and worked out on various case studies to make a comparison between the results obtained from the different analytical methods to check for the variation in the obtained values and arrive at the methods which gives the most favourable results for obtaining the ultimate bearing capacity and also understand the best approaches for such analytical procedures.