Screw Foundation Lateral Force

Screw foundation plays an important role in construction foundation industry. With development of clean energy – solar PV, screw pile foundation serves as solid foundation in the racking system; and it’s more applicable to be used on residential villa, commercial foundation and civil engineering.

When it comes to stability of ground screw foundation, lateral force becomes very important, as it shows how much compression and tension force screw foundation can load when storm, earthquake comes. So before deciding what size of helical foundation pier to be used, the geotechnical report is quite essential.

Lateral force varies according to different type of soil like: clay, silt, fine sand, medium sand, coarse sand, gravel sand, pebble, cobble etc. The denser the soil, the higher the force will be. The bigger the ground screw, the higher the force will be.

After experiment, we were give the below table from China Construction Institute to show lateral force under different soil and helical screw pile foundation sizes. (conservative data)

Ground Screw Foundation Lateral Force Table