Journal of the Korean Geo-Environmental Society ISSN:1598-0820(Print) 2714-1233(Online) 한국지반환경공학회 논문집

A pile group, that consists of several piles connected by a pile cap, is used as the superstructure. The pile supports vertical and horizontal load to design the pile group, but the effect of bearing capacity of the pile cap has not considered. Various researches have been conducted to reflect the effect of bearing capacity of the pile cap in order to reduce the amount of piles in the range of the stability under the vertical load of the superstructure. However, the effect of bearing capacity under the horizontal seismic load has not been studied adequately. Therefore, a shaking table test was carried out with different-sized pile caps that support the superstructure in this study. This test was to verify the influence of the size of the pile cap in the group pile under the horizontal load. The result shows that the size of the pile cap affects to the dynamic behavior of the superstructure and the pile group. Also, the bigger size of the pile group makes the larger constraint effect of ground, and it results that both the ground and the pile moves as a whole.