A Feasibility Study on Monitoring Pile-Soil Bonding Condition Using Piezoceramic Transducer and Horizontal Impact

Daopei Zhu,Siyuan Tian,Haocheng Yan,Zhangli Wang,Jaime Lloret

doi:10.1155/2021/5575854

Daopei Zhu, Siyuan Tian + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/5575854

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Abstract

The in situ evaluation of pile-soil bonding condition plays an important role for pile safety assessment in its life cycle. However, so far, there is still no fully mature tool to analyze such couplings, since the pile-soil coupling exhibits complex and time-varying relationships. This paper innovatively proposes a health monitoring approach to evaluate the bonding status of the soil and pile contact area. An impact method based on a piezoelectric ceramic sensor is proposed to monitor the bond of pile and soil. A horizontal impact was introduced near the top of the pile, and the induced stress waves were detected by the piezoceramic smart aggregate (SA) sensor embedded in the pile. Different crack damage sizes were made between the soil and the pile to investigate the change of the bonding. An energy index was developed to quantitatively evaluate the quality of the bonding as a pile-soil bonding index. The proposed approach inspired a potential way to directly judge if there is crack damage between the pile and soil and to evaluate pile safety.

Highlights

In the construction process, pile as a structural foundation is widely used in soft soil, in order to ensure the safety and stability of the project, and pile foundation detection has become an essential link in the construction process
In the case that there was a larger crack damage depth and range between the pile and the soil, the mechanical deformation of smart aggregate (SA) is larger for the same transient impact
To monitor pile-soil bonding conditions, an innovative approach based on transient impact response using smart aggregate (SA) sensors was proposed

Summary

Introduction

Pile as a structural foundation is widely used in soft soil, in order to ensure the safety and stability of the project, and pile foundation detection has become an essential link in the construction process. The testing of pile foundation can provide the data of the maximum bearing capacity of pile foundation structure and can control the construction process in real time to ensure high quality and efficiency. The above is the study of pile-soil interaction under static state, but in life, most pile-soil interaction is under dynamic state. Chen et al [4] studied a pile response under transient torsional loading, and Wang et al [5] investigated the dynamic torsional response of an end-bearing pile in transversely isotropic saturated soil under harmonic excitations. Low-strain and high-strain integrity testing methods have been widely used for assessing the construction quality of piles in civil engineering [6,7,8].

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