Abstract: At present, the design of horizontal bearing pipe pile still takes that of bored pile as reference, resulting in conservative results. In order to reveal the bearing mechanism and obtain the safety reserve value of pile group effect coefficient of pipe pile under horizontal load, we carried out reduced scale model tests. Test results show that: the test values of bearing capacity of single pile and group piles are larger than the calculated results from Technical Code for Building Pile Foundations. The pile group effect coefficients of model test are approximately 1.2 to 1.5 times of the calculated results from Code. The research results are useful for the design of pipe piles under horizontal load.

Key words: pipe pile, horizontal bearing capacity, reduced scale model test, coefficient of pile group effect, values calculated by Code method