Bearing capacity analysis of helical pile foundation on peat

Abstract

Peat is a kind of soil with a very low bearing capacity and high compressibility. Generally, a building construction on peat is done by using a wooden pile foundation. However, the length of the wooden piles is sometimes limited and causes the friction strength between the soil and wooden piles to became suboptimal. In order to enhance the bearing capacity of the foundation, the cross-sectional area of the foundation needs to be enlarged. One of the solutions for this problem is through helical piles. There are two methods to determine the helical pile's bearing capacity, i.e. individual bearing and cylindrical shear methods. In this paper, bearing capacity prediction was discussed. A foundation load test was thoroughly done by a constant rate of penetration. This test consisted of compression and tension tests. The result was analyzed by individual bearing and cylindrical shear methods and next compared to each other. The result of the analysis has shown that the individual bearing method was more suitable in predicting helical piles' bearing capacity since it produced the lowest error rate, with a magnitude of 21,31%.