Abstract:
Bored piles are one of the famous deep foundation techniques which are practiced all over the world. Most bored piles are
socketed into the bedrock to gain higher bearing capacity. However, the estimation of end bearing capacity for rock socketed
bored piles is questionable in the design of piles. Although there are some pile load tests available to estimate the end bearing
capacity which is very costly, it is not practicable to adopt them for small-scale projects. There are a lot of theoretical methods
that have already been developed to estimate the end-bearing capacity of bored piles on rock and there is no clear indication
of the accuracy of those methods to apply into the Sri Lankan context. Therefore, designers use different methods based on
their experiences which may result in overestimated designs. As such, in this research study, different theoretical methods
were compared with the pile load test results in Sri Lanka and concluded that the most reliable method/s to estimate the
end-bearing capacity of rock socketed bored piles in Sri Lankan context. The suggested method/s in this research study can
be directly applied to estimate the end-bearing capacity of bored piles without conducting any field load tests.
