The effect of sidewall roughness on the shaft resistance of rock-socketed piles

Piles socketed into rock are increasingly used to support loads from large-span bridges and heavy buildings. Peak side resistance is typically related to unconfined compressive strength, sidewall roughness and rock mass quality. This paper presents the results of tests on piles socketed in a weak, artificial rock made of sand, cement, gypsum powder and water. The test results are compared with methods of estimation in which the roughness of the pile–rock interface is modeled explicitly by assuming sinusoidal undulations along the interface. The testing program includes 10 model piles. Some of these piles have nonzero base resistance; others are unsupported at the base. The results indicate that both the degree of roughness of the socket sidewall and the base stiffness are of major importance to the load response of rock-socketed piles. The ultimate unit side resistance was observed to increase substantially with both increasing sidewall roughness and increasing base stiffness, but there is an upper limit to socket roughness beyond which very little increase in side resistance can be obtained. Most of the available correlations used to predict the ultimate side resistance of rock-socketed piles produced conservative estimates for the test piles in this study.