The assessment of an in-situ nail – soil interface resistance and its load displacement characteristic are the main design parameters to ensure the stability and serviceability of a nail reinforced structure. Sufficient field pullout results are required for a safe and economic nailed structure design. However, the number of available pullout test results are always limited by time. In view of this, an attempt was initiated at the National University of Singapore to explore the viability of using dynamic pullout tests as an alternative test method to assess the nail’s static pullout behavior, because dynamic pullout tests appear to be faster than the conventional quasi static pullout tests.

Before the prototype physical experiment for a dynamic nail pullout test will be carried out, a numerical analysis by ‘Plaxis 8.2’ was carried out to numerically understand the nail’s dynamic pullout behavior and to reveal the effect of a different loading duration. Although it is termed as a dynamic pullout test here, the simulated dynamic loading characteristic is similar to a kinetic (Statnamic) pile load test condition with relative wave length > 10 (Holeyman, 1992).