Bending of piles with small diameters in soils with low shear strength

Loading tests in the test pit and in the field

Static system and instrumentation of the pilot plant for large-scale tests

Instrumentation of test piles for field tests

experimental results

• Buckling determined the load capacity for all loaded piles
• The fully plastic normal force was not reached
• The buckling half-wave length was always smaller than the maximum possible
• the failure was apparently spontaneous and did not announce itself