This study investigates the pore water pressure (PWP) behavior of soil around large-diameter open-ended thin- walled piles (LOTPs) during impact driving using a large deformation finite-element method. A comparative analysis of the PWP accumulation curves of the soil inside, outside, and below the LOTP tips with different diameters and wall thicknesses during impact driving is conducted under the same hammering solution. The PWP development is dependent on the absolute distance from the pile surface to the location of the soil and the dimensions of the LOTP. The excess pore water pressure (EPWP) accumulates and gradually dissipates, and its level decreases with increasing pile diameter. However, a negative excess pore water pressure (Ne-EPWP) is identified during hammering. Based on the above findings and analyses, a PWP prediction equation for LOTP during driving is proposed, and the predicted curves are compared with the numerical results. The influence of PWP accumulation after penetration of 2d (d is the LOTP internal diameter) does not increase significantly. This equation can provide the initial distribution field of PWP in saturated clay for LOTPs, thereby facilitating pile drivability analyses.

Drilling with prestressed concrete (DPC) pipe pile is a nonsqueezing pile sinking technology, employing drilling, simultaneous pile sinking, a pipe pile protection wall, and pile side grouting. The unloading induced by drilling, the pipe pile supporting effect, and the dissipation of the negative excess pore-water pressure after pile sinking, all of which have significant effects on the recovery of soil pressure on the pile side, are the main concerns of this study, which aim to establish a method to reasonably evaluate the timing selection of pile side grouting. The theoretical solutions for characterizing the unloading and dissipation of the negative excess pore-water pressure are presented based on the cylindrical cavity contraction model and the separated variable method. By inverse-analyzing the measured initial pore pressure change data from borehole unloading, initial soil pressures on the pile side of each soil layer are determined using the presented theoretical solutions. Then, the presented theoretical solutions were verified through a comparative analysis with the corresponding measured results. Moreover, by introducing time-dependent coefficients alpha(t1) and alpha(t2) to characterize the pore pressure dissipation and rheology effects, the effects of the negative excess pore-water pressure dissipation on the pile-side soil pressure recovery are discussed in detail.