Abstract
This paper proposes a procedure to investigate the effect of construction control on the safety of driven piles, and provides a theoretical basis to verify and support existing empirical factors of safety (FS) and resistance factors used to account for the effect of construction control. The procedure is formalized in the Bayesian framework. In particular, how the FS and resistance factor can be determined in a rational manner based on on-site dynamic pile tests is explored. Five design methods for driven piles are investigated to illustrate the proposed procedure and parametric studies are performed to evaluate the effect of number of tests or analyses on the updated FS. The results indicate that the required FS can be reduced and resistance factor can be increased considerably through careful construction control, which depends on design methods, on-site test methods, and the level of control implemented. The required FSs and resistance factors after construction control obtained from this study are consistent with the existing empirical values. After sufficient control tests, the required FSs and resistance factors for different design methods are not sensitive to the accuracy of the individual design methods.
