At the Indian Geotechnical Conference-2020, the presentatation made by Mr. Ravi Sundaram on our paper titled Short Piles for a Solar Power Plant in Western Rajasthan authored by Mohit Jhalani, Jitendra Kumar, Ravi Sundaram & Sanjay Gupta was very much appreciated and awarded as second-best paper on the theme of Pile Foundations.

The paper discusses the load-displacement behavior of 350 mm diameter 2.65-2.8 m long piles under pullout and lateral loading. To evaluate ultimate pullout capacity of piles which were not tested to failure, a hyperbolic model of load-displacement curve has been proposed. The pullout test data has been used to back-calculate the value of earth pressure coefficient, k. The lateral pile capacity has also been analyzed to evaluate the value of modulus of horizontal subgrade reaction.