ADVANCES IN THE EVALUATION OF PILE AND SHAFT QUALITY

For the past half century, great efforts have been made and progress has been achieved in developing a variety of electronic testing methods for the quality control and quality assurance of deep foundations. These developments took advantage of major advances in ever more accurate and sensitive sensor manufacturing and faster and more powerful computers. The dynamic pile testing methods were the primary beneficiaries of these R&D efforts and its application has been expanded from bearing capacity assessment of driven piles to drilled shafts, micro piles and even penetrometers. In addition to soil resistance, results from construction monitoring now provide information about stresses along the pile, pile integrity and occasionally soil vibrations. Dynamic pile testing methods also include nondestructive techniques involving sonic and ultra sonic signals. Much of the recent developments involved not only ruggedizing hardware and preparation of more user friendly software, but also deriving reliable calculation procedures and presenting results in a way which is easy for the report recipient to understand. Additionally, experiences from construction sites showed that an immediate assessment of the foundation characteristics is imperative. This requirement lead to the need for easily used simulation software and workshops. Today such training events are frequently performed over the internet. This presentation summarizes several recent hardware and software developments and shows a few typical results.