Despite its wide use as a tool in foundation design, the piezocone penetration test (CPTU) has been rarely recommended to work for design and analysis of laterally loaded piles. Obtaining lateral response of pile foundations is a complicated engineering problem, especially in nonhomogeneous soils. This paper presents a review of the relationship between the piezocone test and the bearing response of laterally loaded piles and introduces a framework for estimating p-y curves for clays directly using CPTU parameters. To validate this method, full-scale lateral load tests of bored piles with corresponding CPTU tests in Jiangsu soil deposits were conducted and data were compared with the predicted results. In addition, case histories were further considered in detail to study the application of the proposed method for different field conditions. The results predicted by the proposed CPTU-based p-y curve agreed relatively well with the measured results. The proposed method can provide a fast and effective design tool that can be applied to clayey soils with full consideration of soil profiles along the pile-embedded depth.

Foundation reuse is the development trend of sustainable engineering construction. However, the reuse of existing piles as rigid inclusions and their contribution to newly constructed piles (new piles) under different new and existing pile spacings are still insufficiently understood. In this paper, a series of numerical investigations were conducted based on centrifuge tests to examine the effect of existing piles on the lateral behavior of new piles under different pile spacings. The existing pile efficiency that reflects the contribution of existing piles to the lateral capacity of new piles was analyzed, and it was shown that the impact of existing piles decays exponentially with the pile spacing between new and existing piles. Beyond the spacing of 6 D ( D: the diameter of new piles), the lateral new pile–soil–existing pile interaction can be neglected. A parametric study was subsequently performed to quantify the existing pile efficiency under different variables, including the new pile-head restraint, loading displacement, bending stiffness, load eccentricity, embedded depth, and soil properties. Finally, an existing pile efficiency-based method for the estimation of the lateral capacity of new piles was proposed, which provides an efficient way to design laterally loaded new piles in sites with existing piles.