Soil Testing Instrumentation Capabilities
Our instrumentation capabilities include the installations of modern sensors, transducers, and data logging systems to acquire field measurements for:
- Plate Load Testing
- Load Testing of footings and pile foundations
- In-situ pore water pressure measurements using vibrating wire piezometers, as well as pneumatic piezometers.
- Strain gauge applications (we install and instrument foil strain gauges to structural elements)
- Measurements of loads, pressures, and displacements using load cells, pressure transducers, and LVDTs
- Dynamic measurements of displacement on foundations (structural members)
- Wave velocity measurements using proximitors, geophones, and accelerometers
- In-situ electric conductivity of soils using the Wenner four-point method
Measurement of soils peak particle velocities during pile driving or sheetpile vibratory installation
Gallery
Plate load test configuration. The load-displacement test response is used to determine the modulus of subgrade reaction.
Typical instrumentation equipment to monitor displacements, pressures, and loads in real time.
Instrumentation
Load testing of a micropile. The yellow reference beams support the LVDT displacement sensors. Our instrumentation capabilities include the measurement of displacements, forces, strains, pressures, for both static and dynamic applications.
Cantilevered aluminum beam instrumented with a LVDT displacement transducer and a triaxial accelerometer unit. The purpose of the setup is to correlate the responses between the displacement transducer and the acceleration-based transducer.
For the cantilevered beam under a free vibration excitation, the velocities captured from the accelerometer and LVDT are closely matched. This comparison provides a high degree of confidence in our dynamic measurements. Redundant measurements using different types of transducers are essential to ensure good quality data.
Instrumentation
Dynamic measurements presented in frequency domain is a valuable data to identify structural natural frequencies, as well as to assess structural deterioration or degradation (frequency shift).
A calibration steel pipe is instrumented with vibrating wire strain gauges and foil strain gauges. Setups like this are used to assess gauge performance under controlled testing conditions.