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Integrity testing of deep foundation piles

PileInspect: Integrity testing of deep foundation piles

Background

A hundred thousand kilometres of piles are installed yearly in Europe. Pile defects can occur during pile driving including spalling, cracking and breaking. In cast-in-place piles defects can occur during boring or concreting. If a failure is detected, the cost of that pile could be increased by four times due to the remedial work needed to replace it. If a failure is not detected, the results can be catastrophic. The results of existing non-automatic techniques for determining pile integrity are often difficult to interpret, subjective and dependent on accurate knowledge of pile and soil parameters.

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Objectives

PileInspect aims are to develop and experimentally validate the new vibration technology and low cost automatic near real time system for inspecting the integrity of piles. Highly innovative signal processing tools based on time frequency techniques will be employed in order to improve the effectiveness of pile diagnosis and perform automatic pile integrity testing.

Benefits

The primary application for the PileInspect technology will be in the quality assurance of deep foundation piles. PileInspect will provide an innovative quality assurance process, enabling a cost effective, efficient and reliable means of monitoring the integrity of all types of piles.

Project Partners

  • DFI
  • AEND
  • GSP
  • BAM
  • BMNED
  • AARSLEFF
  • Cranfield University
  • PileTest
  • Brunel University London

For more information, please visit the PileInspect website.


Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Professor Tat-Hean Gan

Related Research Group(s)

woman engineer

Brunel Innovation Centre - A world-class research and technology centre that sits between the knowledge base and industry.


Partnering with confidence

Organisations interested in our research can partner with us with confidence backed by an external and independent benchmark: The Knowledge Exchange Framework. Read more.


Project last modified 12/03/2021