We had a great two days out in sunny and hot San Diego installing piles. The team did a great job with all the instrumentation and we only lost 27 gages (out of 152) due to sand abrasion, mostly at the helix level, and some crunched wires. The amount of data we’ll collect should be outstanding. We will spend Wednesday and Thursday hooking up the instrumentation and hopefully we will be ready to shake by Friday morning – if not Friday, then we’ll shake first thing Tuesday and then start putting on the pile caps and concrete donut weights for a shake either Wednesday (17th) afternoon or Thursday (18th).
Here is another recent news story about our seismic research project!
http://www.koco.com/news/ou-researcher-studying-building-techniques-for-earthquakes/37878158
WOW – great progress continues. Congrats to the team!
I am curious how much torque was required to install the piles – on average.
What great media coverage you’re getting from your peeps by in OK. I guess you’re a “rock” star now.
Keep up the great work, and I’ll see you (hopefully) Wednesday afternoon.
Bill
Bill,
The 5.5″ piles were between 24-27 kip-feet of torque and the 3.5″ were around 7.5-10 kip-feet of torque – I haven’t plotted up the torque profiles yet, but those were the highest torques I saw.
Amy
Great job you are doing, look forward to the published results and findings.
I am interested to know if any of the piles had welded joints and whether the joints were monitored during the testing.