Vertical bearing behavior of rigid and flexible piles in pile-supported embankment

The field tests on the pile-supported embankment of an express way in soft soil area are performed to capture the performance of pre-stressed high-strength concrete pipe piles and high-pressure jet grouting piles with time. The rationality of the selection of interface element and constitutive model used in the finite element numerical simulation software is verified according to the comparison between simulated and field test results. The bearing behavior of the pre-stressed high-strength concrete pipe piles under different construction stages is then analyzed by using the finite element numerical simulation software, and a parametric study is made to assess the influences of pile length, pile diameter and area replacement ratio on the performances of the pile-supported embankment. The optimization parameters of the rigid piles in the pile-supported embankment are obtained. The numerical results show that the bearing capacity of piles can be increased due to the loads shared by the pile cap. The ratio of pile cap size to pile spacing has a significant impact on the embankment settlement, and the embankment settlement can be effectively controlled when the ratio is 0.67 to 0.74.