Predicting the behavior of driven piles is a key issue in practical engineering

particularly in major bridge

wind turbines

harbor and offshore engineering applications where the piled foundations are widely used to underpin the superstructures and the pile capacity is seldom determined from pile load tests. Numerous methods exist for calculation of axial pile capacity in clay

including four design methods

namely Furgo-96

NGI-99

ICP-05 and UWA-13. However

application of the latter in mainstream civil engineering sector has been relatively slow

possibly because of the small number of high quality

full scale

case histories available to demonstrate their potential benefits. Thus

it is necessary to collect a more comprehensive database to evaluate the performance of the four design methods objectively and to assist designers in the selection of the most appropriate method. A new ZJU-ICL Clay database with 89 high-quality pile load tests is formed by expanding the major databases with new available pile load tests. Database assessment of these four methods and evaluation of the predictive performance by using mean ? and coefficient of variation COV are presented.