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Nondestructive Method for Length Estimation of Pile Foundations Through Effective Dispersion Analysis of Reflections

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Abstract

Motivated by the important problem of unknown foundations, a nondestructive evaluation technique, named effective dispersion analysis of reflections (EDAR), is developed for estimating embedded depth of pile foundations. EDAR testing involves laterally exciting the pile with the hammer and measuring the accelerations at two other points on the pile. The novelty of EDAR comes from the processing these signals; unlike existing methods, EDAR accurately captures the effect of physical dispersion of the waves as they propagate in the pile, and the reflections from the pile tip. The key to data processing is the EDAR plot, which is a plot of phase difference between the two responses as a function of newly introduced effective wavenumber that encapsulates the wave dispersion characteristics. The methodology is easy to use in that a simple formula can convert the oscillatory characteristics of EDAR plot to the unknown embedded depth. This paper contains the derivation of the underlying formulation followed by verification with synthetic models and validation in laboratory settings, resulting in less than 5% error in embedded length.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Alaska Department of Transportation (Mike Knapp and Hiram Henry) and the North Carolina Department of Transportation (Mohammed Mulla) for funding and their continued support of the EDAR development. We also thank Mervyn Kowalsky and Diego Aguirre for allowing us to perform EDAR tests on the piles installed for their project at North Carolina State University.

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  1. Department of Civil Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695-7908, USA

    Vivek Samu & Murthy Guddati

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  1. Vivek Samu
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  2. Murthy Guddati
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Correspondence to Murthy Guddati.

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Patent Application Publication US 2017/0322011 A1 (Application No. 15/587,469) has been applied and is under review.

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Samu, V., Guddati, M. Nondestructive Method for Length Estimation of Pile Foundations Through Effective Dispersion Analysis of Reflections. J Nondestruct Eval 38, 45 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10921-019-0583-8

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