The overall objective of this project is to gain an insight into the mechanism of development of axial capacity of open-ended steel-pipe piles and thus lead to an improvement in the current design recommendation. The objective of this research is to design and build a facility for driving model piles and to perform some preliminary tests on open-ended model pipe piles.
The prohibitive cost of running field load tests justifies the use of model tests in the laboratory. Compared to the field, model tests in the laboratory lend themselves to more human control and one can segregate the effects of different factors. Although, complete similitude conditions are never achieved, the data obtained from model tests agrees more or less with the actual fields tests (Vesic 1969).
