The Press-in Method is a static installation method for sheet piles and pipe piles. It secures a reaction force from previously installed piles, and provides a spatially efficient piling work without the need of additional temporary works, even on slopes or above the water. The method has been applied to various projects such as the functional upgrade of the existing structures, restoration of geotechnical structures damaged by heavy rain or earthquakes, disaster prevention and mitigation, prevention of landslide and others. Along with these applications, there has been a growing need for sophisticated methods of design and construction control. This paper reports a series of field tests which were conducted for sophisticating the current construction control method for a penetration technique called the Rotary Cutting Press-in (RCP) Method, where a pipe pile with base cutting teeth is pushed and rotated at the same time. Sixteen sets of installation tests and the rapid loading tests were conducted on the RCP piles with the outer diameter of 1000 mm in dense sands and gravels, by using an actual RCP piling machine and a newly developed spatially effective rapid loading test device. As a result, the effects of the axial loading without rotation at the end of installation and the air injection during installation on the pile capacity were confirmed to be limited, and the pile capacity estimated from the RCP piling data were shown to provide a lower bound for the capacity obtained by the rapid loading test.
Ishihara et al. (Thu,) studied this question.