Large-diameter steel pipe piles are increasingly used as deep foundations in major infrastructure projects such as offshore wind farms for renewable energy and sea-crossing bridges. How to accurately estimate their bearing capacity is a difficult problem in geotechnical engineering. Prof Jun Yang of the Department of Civil Engineering and Dr Feng Yu (former PhD student, now Professor at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University in China) have developed a new method which takes proper account of the key mechanisms involved in a rational yet simple way. The method, named the HKU method, was published in the reputed geotechnical journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers (Vol. 138, No.9). Since its publication, the method has been well received by researchers and engineers in the field. In 2016, researchers at the University of Stuttgart in Germany published a technical paper in which they evaluated the HKU method along with several other methods used in the Europe and the US using field test data, and concluded that the HKU method has the best predictive performance. Most recently, the method was reviewed and referenced by the authoritative guidelines of the US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
Link: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29GT.1943-5606.0000667?mi=3cb6ce