Load transfer and bearing capacity of inclined pile under vertical load

Inclination of piles may occur due to different reasons.Most inclinations of piles are beyond the limitation imposed by the Technical Code for Building Pile Foundations(JGJ94—94).How to determine the bearing capacity of inclined piles is a tough problem in practice.Field load tests on 6 inclined piles with different degrees of inclination were performed and their bearing capacities were compared.It was shown by test results that the bearing capacity did not necessarily decrease when the degree of inclination decreases if the inclination was within a small range.Based on modeling one of the load-test results of inclined piles,the required characteristics of soil for FEM analysis were obtained to conduct numerical analysis.The load transfer and bearing capacity of piles with different degrees of inclination under different soil conditions were studied.It was shown by numerical analysis that under the same vertical load the settlement of piles with the degree of inclination no more than 4 percent was even smaller than that of a vertical pile,but comparatively large bending moment would be produced,thus for inclined pile,enough rigidity and strength were required to resist these bending moment and lateral displacement.Lateral displacement and bending of inclined pile could be reduced with the introduction of pile cap.