Experimental Study on the Bearing Capacities of Sheet Pile Foundation in Saturated Clay Ground

In recent years, offshore wind power has been an important way to generate renewable energy and reduce the influence of greenhouse effect. The target of this research is to investigate the bearing capacity characteristics of steel sheet piles as foundations of offshore wind farms. In this study, a series of experiments were conducted to investigate the bearing capacity characteristics of a single steel sheet pile model and a sheet pile group foundation model in a saturated clay ground. According to experiment results, both single pile and pile group in vertical load test (VLT) show similar load-settlement behavior, which is related to the mechanical properties of the overconsolidated clay. Due to the difference in bending rigidity of sheet pile in the direction of the strong axis and weak axis, pile arrangement of pile group significantly influenced the horizontal load carried by each pile, and more effective pile arrangements need to be discussed in future studies.