An investigation into vertical capacity of steel sheet piles installed by the Standard Press-in method

Steel sheet piles have long been used for temporary retaining structures. Nowadays, they are increasingly applied to non-temporary structures, but the number of load tests on sheet piles conducted so far is limited, and methods of estimating vertical and horizontal performance of sheet piles have not been well developed, possibly leading to some conservatism in design of sheet piles. Accumulation of load test results on sheet piles is essential for understanding the performance of sheet piles and rationalizing their design method. This paper focuses on sheet piles installed by Standard Press-in, and introduces three cases of static vertical load tests conducted in the field, which are collected from published sources. The results were used for back-analyzing the values of coefficients in an SPT-based design method. As a result, it was found out that the total capacity of the sheet pile can be safely estimated.