## 5 Conclusions  
This study has designed a reduced-scale model experiment to explore the performance of battered piles resisting lateral soil movement in a test tank filled with sandy soil. To minimize the error caused by the disturbance of loading and maintain the loading stress level, a lever loading system was designed, comprising the bearing plate under the pivot (angle steel), a one-end hinged lever (universal beam), and balance weight blocks. High sensitivity sensors (i.e., the dial indicators, strain gauges, and earth pressure cells) were instrumented to record the responses of the pile and the embankment (i.e., pile deflection and strain, earth pressure, and subgrade reaction). Moreover, the effects of pile inclinations, surcharge magnitudes, and constraint conditions at the pile tip on pile responses are considered. On account of these test observations, the consequences can be drawn as follows:  
1. The battered piles are significantly superior to the vertical piles in resisting lateral soil movements, and the negative battered piles outperform the other piles, providing a feasible alternative solution to the reinforcement project. In particular, the effect of the pile inclination on the maximum responses of the pile-soil system under different surcharge loads is intuitively given in tabular forms. In this way, a quantitative understanding of this effect is helpful to the preliminary design of the project and provides a certain basis for the follow-up field tests. 2. The value of earth pressure on the vertical piles is not the maximum but is intermedial to the ones of the battered piles. This characteristic is different from that of the pile deflection and bending moment, and the difference can be first interpreted by the greater stress transfer onto the pile because of the closer embankment-pile distance and then the additional self-weight of soil overlying the positive battered pile. 3. Almost all the maximum earth pressure would appear at \(z_{\alpha}\) = 0.5, but the earth pressure vanishes earlier for the negative battered piles; the earth pressures on the negative battered piles decrease to zero near \(z_{\alpha}\) = 1.25, whereas those of the positive battered piles are close to zero near \(z_{\alpha}\) = 1.5. Consequently, the effect of embankment on the pile is minimized for the negative battered piles. 4. The negative battered pile of greater inclination can transfer the earth pressure to a deeper depth; the locations of maximum bending moments in the case of \(\beta=-20^{\circ}\) are deeper than those in the case of \(\beta=-10^{\circ}\). 5. Because of greater energy dissipated by a stronger constraint, the responses under the fixed tip boundary conditions are significantly less than those under free tip boundary conditions. The fixed tip is thus more favorable, but considerable negative bending moments, even significantly greater than the positive bending moments, would occur at the lower part. This article explores the performance of battered single piles in a sand test tank to resist lateral soil movement using model testing methods. However, there has been no discussion on composite piles under active loads, such as pile raft foundations [44; 45; 46], as well as issues related to unsaturated soil [43; 47] and moisture migration [48; 49; 50], which still need to be further addressed.