A Study on the Pull-out Resistance of Dynamically Driven Nails and the Cavity Expansion Method

The problem is how to assess normal stresses around dynamically driven nails. Pull-out tests show that these stresses are much higher than it would follow from classical analyses. Therefore, an analysis of the cavity expansion method was applied to study this problem. It was shown that the cavity expansion method, widely applied in soil mechanics, suffers from many shortcomings. It was also shown that this method is not closely related to cone penetration tests, nor to the technology of dynamic soil nailing.