In the dock and deep sea engineering,the shear key is often used to connect the steel pipe pile and the upper structure,which can improve the bearing capacity and structural integrity of the steel pipe pile.The spacing of shear keys is an important factor affecting the mechanical performance of steel pipe pile heads.Taking the steel pipe pile with two shear keys at the pile head as the research object,eight sets of finite element models are established,and the test values in Gebman test report and numerical model values are compared.The results showed that:1)The error between the experimental value and the digital modulus value is small,and the change trend is consistent.2)The bearing capacity of steel pipe piles and the composite stiffness of steel pipe piles increase at first and then decrease with the increase of shear key spacing.When the shear key spacing is between 1.0D and 1.2D,the steel pipe piles are in best performance.3)The optimal design spacing of the shear key is always around 1.0D.With the increase of the pile diameter,the optimal design spacing of the shear key can be appropriately reduced.The research results provide an important reference for the shear key design of steel pipe pile head in actual engineering.