Abstract: Predicting the behavior of driven piles is a key issue in practical engineering, particularly in major bridge, wind turbines, harbor and offshore engineering applications where the piled foundations are widely used to underpin the superstructures and the pile capacity is seldom determined from pile load tests. Numerous methods exist for calculation of axial pile capacity in clay, including four design methods, namely Furgo-96, NGI-99, ICP-05 and UWA-13. However, application of the latter in mainstream civil engineering sector has been relatively slow, possibly because of the small number of high quality, full scale, case histories available to demonstrate their potential benefits. Thus, it is necessary to collect a more comprehensive database to evaluate the performance of the four design methods objectively and to assist designers in the selection of the most appropriate method. A new ZJU-ICL Clay database with 89 high-quality pile load tests is formed by expanding the major databases with new available pile load tests. Database assessment of these four methods and evaluation of the predictive performance by using mean ? and coefficient of variation COV are presented.

Key words: driven pile, axial bearing capacity, clay, static loading test, database