Abstract
Sound barrier walls are necessary for highways when alignments cross residential areas. Drilled shafts (caissons) are simple foundations for sound barrier walls. Four different design methods for drilled shafts are discussed and compared. All methods result in comparable capacities for shafts up to certain embedment depths, as is indicated by the analysis. Two of the methods, which originally were developed only for level ground, are modified to accommodate sloped ground surfaces. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1288, Geotechnical engineering 1990.