Experimental Study for the Improvement of an Automated PHC Pile Head Cutter

Several advanced countries have been continually developed PHC pile cutting automation machines for improving productivity, safety and quality of the conventional PHC pile cutting work. However, the target work of the previously developed PHC pile cutting automation machines is only crushing the head of PHC pile. Dangerous grinding work is still performed by workers with seven inch hand grinder. In domestic construction industry, the PHC pile cutting work is usually performed by a crusher and three to four skilled workers. Recent analysis results of the PHC pile cutting work reveal that it frequently makes a lot of cracks which significantly reduce the strength of the pile and is labor-intensive work. The primary objective of this study is to propose the end-effector which can effectively break PHC pile without any longitudinal cracks and to develop an automated pile cutting machine having unified grinder and crusher parts through a wide variety of laboratory and field tests. It is anticipated that the development of the automated pile cutting machine would be able to bring improvements in safety, productivity, quality as well as cost saving.