Modelling helical screw piles in soft clay and design implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Helical screw piles are a popular solution for relatively low-capacity, removable or recyclable foundations supporting road and rail signage or similar light structures. When specifying a helical screw pile, a designer must choose the active length and the helical plate spacing ratio, which are governed by the number, spacing and size of the individual helices. This paper presents an investigation using transparent synthetic soil and particle image velocimetry to observe the failure of helical screw piles with helical plate spacing ratios of 1·5–3 and active lengths up to three times the diameter. For the geometries and properties examined, capacity is shown to be a function of active length and the dominant failure mechanism is characterised by the formation of a cylindrical failure surface. A simple analytical model is developed and used to assess the impact of different design methodologies on immediate displacements under loading. A traditional ‘permissible stress' method is shown to be conservative, whereas modern ‘partial factor' methods are more economical and lead to greater immediate displacements for a given design load. Designers using modern ‘partial factor' approaches, such as Eurocode 7, might benefit from specifying a helical plate spacing ratio of less than 1·5 to maximise the stiffness of the response to axial loading and minimise the immediate displacements experienced upon application of working loads.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".