Piles Engineering

Compression of rockfill is normally caused by a reduction in dimension of fill and by rearrangement of particles into closer packing.

When the rockfill are saturated, the strength of rock would be reduced accordingly. In fact, wetting of rock surfaces does not reduce the coefficient of sliding friction between rockfills. Considerable settlement may result not from the lubricating effect of water but from a reduction of rock strength at its point of contact. The contact points would then be crushed under intergranular force and the contact area increases until contact pressure is less than the strength of rockfill.
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Most of design codes assume that pile fails during strong earthquake by lateral spreading. Lateral spreading is based on bending mechanism where the inertia and slope movement causes bending in piles. In essence, piles are considered as beams which are subjected to lateral loads such as slope movement leading to pile failure.
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The use of prestressed tiebacks gets rid of the need of interior bracing. Prestressed tiebacks are anchored into rock or granular soils and excavation can be conducted by using powerful shovel instead of using hand excavation or other small excavators. It provides less restraint and allows free movement for excavation.
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The quality of slurry plays an important role in the quality of diaphragm walls. Firstly, if a thick slurry cake is formed in the interface between slurry and in-situ soil, it has a tendency to fall off during concreting works and it mixes with freshly placed concrete. Moreover, large thickness of slurry cake would reduce the concrete cover and affect the future durability performance of diaphragm walls.
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The most ideal situation is to supply each tremie pipe with a single concrete truck. However, if only one concrete truck is available, all the fresh concrete in the truck should not be placed in one single tremie pipe.

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