Pile CapacityDrilled shafts, bored and CFA piles
From soil data to pile capacity.
A design tool for estimating the axial bearing and uplift capacity of cast-in-situ bored and CFA piles: map-based projects, layered soil and rock models, load-or-length solving in metric or US units, and reports that show every step of the calculation.
One site, six designs: each with its own soil profile, pile schedule and results, and each kept exactly as it was when you locked it.
What you get
Built to show its work
A capacity you can defend is one you can take apart. Every stage exposes the numbers behind it: profile, piles, results, reporting.
Every site on one map
Projects live on an interactive map rather than in a folder tree: pin the site, and every design for it sits under that pin. Search by address or coordinates, keep multiple designs per project, and lock, duplicate and iterate on a design while the earlier version stays exactly as it was.
Build the profile, watch it draw
Enter borehole and ground-water elevations, then stack layers: fill, manual, granular, cohesive, weak rock, weak rock custom, rock socket after Tomlinson. Each type asks only for the parameters its model actually uses, and the profile redraws beside the form as you type, to scale, with the water table in place.
Solve for load, or solve for length
Switch the whole design between Load-Target and Length-Input. Give it the load a pile has to carry and it returns the embedment that carries it; give it an embedment and it returns the capacity. Diameters, cut-off levels, safety factors and tension loads are per pile, so a design can carry a whole pile schedule at once.
Compare the whole design at a glance
Results put every pile on the same soil profile at the same scale, each drawn to its solved length, with the allowable-capacity curves beside them. Differences between a 600 mm and a 2000 mm pile are something you see rather than something you work out from a table.
A calculation package, not a printout
Every design exports as a PDF report: pile properties, the ultimate and allowable breakdown with its safety factors, per-layer tables and true-to-scale figures of effective stress, unit skin friction, unit end bearing and the capacity envelopes. And as an Excel workbook where those numbers are live formulas.
Put your iterations head to head
Iterating only pays if you can see what changed. Pick any analysed designs in a project and any of their piles, and read them against each other: a sortable capacity summary with expandable ultimate breakdowns, two piles side by side on their own soil profiles, and every allowable-capacity curve overlaid on one chart.
Start from a sentence, not a form
Type the brief the way you would say it: “1.2 m pile for 3000 kN tension, 10 m of medium dense sand, then weak rock at 5 MPa.” The AI drafts the complete design from it (layers, water table, pile schedule, analysis mode) and lands you in the ordinary editor, where every value it assumed rather than read stays outlined until you check it. Prefer to keep the text on your machine? Run the model in your own browser instead.
Reference manual & verification
Nothing here is a black box
Every formula, written down
The reference manual documents the complete calculation engine in thirteen chapters: one per soil and rock model, over a shared framework of effective stress, pile geometry and safety factors. Every formula the software evaluates is reproduced in it, numbered and cross-referenced, with its source in the geotechnical literature cited and collected in a bibliography, and a symbols table carrying SI and US units for each quantity.
The friction acting along the pile shaft in a cohesive layer is estimated with the total-stress alpha method O’Neill and Reese (1999):
| Symbol | Definition | SI | US |
|---|---|---|---|
| qₛ | ultimate unit skin friction | kPa | psi |
| α | factor of adhesion | – | – |
| cᵤ | undrained shear strength | kPa | psf |
An Excel report that still calculates
Alongside the PDF, every design exports as a spreadsheet; it is not a dump of results. The primitive inputs are data cells; everything downstream is a live formula. Effective stress integrated layer by layer through the water table, unit skin friction and end bearing for each layer’s model, skin friction integrated at interval midpoints exactly as the engine does it, pile weight and uplift. Click any cell and the formula bar shows the step that produced it. Change an input and the workbook re-solves.
| Row | C | D | E | F | G | H |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9 | Layer 2: Stiff clay (cohesive) | |||||
| 10 | Level | σ′ᵥ | cᵤ | α | qₛ | ΣQₛ |
| 11 | −6.00 | 108.0 | 95.0 | 0.55 | 52.3 | 394.1 |
| 12 | −7.00 | 117.2 | 95.0 | 0.55 | 52.3 | 591.3 |
| 13 | −8.00 | 126.4 | 95.0 | 0.55 | 52.3 | 788.5 |
Read the manual before you buy it
The preview edition is a real PDF, free and without an account: an executive summary, the full table of contents, complete sample pages from the cohesive-soil and Tomlinson rock-socket chapters, and samples of both the PDF calculation report and the Excel data report.
Capabilities
The full datasheet
Pricing
No subscriptions. No lock-ins.
Most engineering software forces you into ongoing subscriptions: month after month, they take your money whether you use the product or not. Today, we’re ending that. You buy access, you choose how long you need it: pay only when you need access.
Short-term work
1 Week
A deadline, a verification, one intense week. Pay once, use it, and walk away.
Short-term project
1 Month
One project, one payment. When it ends, there is nothing to cancel and nothing to owe.
Ongoing use
2 Years
The long haul, secured upfront. No card on file, nothing renewing behind your back.
Secure cloud infrastructure
Access periods exist because that is how the software is delivered: everything runs in the browser.
Nothing to install
No setup, no licenses to manage, no IT involvement on your end.
Always the latest version
You are always on the current release, with updates handled automatically.
Bundles
Working across multiple areas?
The same freedom, bundled at a discount: one purchase covers several tools, full access to each, and still nothing renews.
Discounted packages
Pile bundle
Pile Section together with Pile Capacity, for the structural section and the geotechnical capacity of the same pile.
The full suite
Complete hetGE bundle
Access to our full software suite, along with early access to upcoming tools such as our slope stability software.
store.hetGE.com · priced against the licenses you already hold