After many weeks of preparation, the construction company finally commenced loading the 1 m diam working piles as per the standard pile test procedures, on 7th Jan 2014. I believed the maximum load would be 500 tons, twice its working load, but normally the load will be applied slowly, such as 200 tons on the first day and the deflections are recorded for 24 hours.
Two technicians have to be there day and night for 4 days.
These photos are self explanatory to all engineers I bet.
This is the pressure testing equipment setup. In the red is the hydraulic pressure pump, the pressure gauges on the blue inverted pail that connects to the load piston plunger (on top of the concrete pile). 4 dial gauges at each corner are used to monitor the downward deflections.
Close up of the loading plunger, with maximum capacity of 1000 tons but only half of that capacity would be used.
The two technicians who has the unenviable task of monitoring the testing for 4 days and night. They got a good stocks of food and drinks though, he he he.. Cheer up boys !!
This is an update:
As on Friday 10 January 2014, I dropped by to have a looked and was told that the design working load for the 1 m diam bored pile is 225 tons and the maximum test load was 450 tons, which produced a maximum downward deflection of 4.1 mm only, and when the load was released after 4 days of testing, the residual deflection was only 2 mm.
I think the pile passed the load test with flying colours as expected anyway.
It is the same boring boring test for GTS testing lab who has done probably hundreds of this kind of test. Meanwhile the logo BGE means Borneo Geotechnical Engineering company.
Looks like still using manually recording....human recorder ;-)
ReplyDeleteWithout a doubt, they still do. Perhaps using humans is still cheaper than the expensive automated machines and provide two guys with jobs. he he he he
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