Reliability prediction of the axial ultimate bearing capacity of piles: A hierarchical Bayesian method

Abstract

The sea reclamation is one of the efficient ways to alleviate the shortage of land resources due to population growth, and the corresponding axial ultimate bearing capacity of piles has become one of the critical factors for evaluating the performance of the soil layer reclamation work. Many models are used to analyze the testing data. However, these models cannot describe the mean population bearing capacity and unit-to-unit variation simultaneously, and they cannot give the reliability of predicting the axial ultimate bearing capacity of piles. Thus, they are rarely used in practice. In this article, we propose a mixed-effects model, which could overcome the drawback of the models in the literature. A hierarchical Bayesian framework is developed to estimate the model parameters using Gibbs sampling. The proposed model is applied to a real pile dataset collected in silt-rock layer area, and we predict the mean axial bearing capacities under different reliability levels.

Research on the Analytical Conversion Method of Q-s Curves for Self-Balanced Test Piles in Layered Soils

“…where E p and A p stand for the pile unit's elastic modulus and cross-sectional area, respectively. By substituting Equations ( 6), ( 8), (10) and (11) into Equation ( 9), the control equation of the node i can be described as Equation ( 12):…”

“…In order to ensure the safety and reliability of pile foundations, the bearing capacity test of the pile foundation is essential [1][2][3]. The traditional methods for static load testing of foundation piles mainly include the vertical compressive pile load method and anchor pile method [4][5][6][7], the high-strain method for dynamic testing of pile bearing capacity [8,9], the probability analysis model, which predicts and evaluates the accuracy of the single-pile bearing capacity [10][11][12], and the finite element approach of numerical simulation of the pile foundation [13][14][15]. However, a novel technique for evaluating the bearing capability of foundation piles is the self-balanced test pile method.…”