Driven piles offer significant advantages. Unlike poured piles, they don’t bulge or spread in soft soil conditions. As a result, they retain their original shape which optimizes load-carrying capacity and ensures they perform according to the engineered criteria.
Pile driving is one of the most environmentally friendly methods of getting deep foundations. Pile driving doesn’t produce the extra spills and clean up of other methods. The only disturbance is the area for the pile driver and where the pile itself goes.
Dynamic and Static Load testing will need to be performed once the piles are set. While multiple processes are available, the two of the most used are PDA (Pile Driving Analyzer®) and Case Pile Wave Analysis Program (CAPWAP®).
What major event in history had a huge effect on the advancement of pile driver technology? The Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, pile drivers had to be powered by people and animals, but after the Revolution, pile drivers powered by steam and eventually diesel became available.
If you’re confronting a deep foundation challenge, driven piles are typically the most effective solution. They’re cost effective, have a smaller displacement footprint, require less time to install and involve less site cleanup after they’re installed.
Is the ground where you’re installing piles soft? Poured piles can bulge in softer soil conditions to create problems with structural stability. Driven piles, on the other hand, hold onto their shape during installation so they’ll be more structurally sound.
The invention of the modern pile driver is surprisingly hard to pin down. It's been ascribed to famous inventors like Leonardo da Vinci, but evidence has been found that devices like it were used as early as 5,000 years ago.
A major benefit of driven piles is that they are highly adaptable, meaning they can be installed to accommodate compression, tension, or lateral loads. The piles will be selected specifically to meet the requirements of the structure, as well as current site conditions.
Historically, piles were usually made out of wood for its durability and strength. Modern piles can still be made of wood, but are also made out of steel or concrete. Some can even be composite piles, such as concrete with a steel tip.
Diesel hammers are actually a large, two-stroke diesel engine. Instead of dropping a hammer, a piston is dropped to jumpstart the engine process. The diesel combustion delivers a force much more powerful than dropping a hammer.
Driven piles will compact and strengthen the surrounding soil, a distinct advantage during foundation construction. Other processes may require soil removal, weakening the placement zone and causing the soil to subside.
The pile driving technique's historical beginning is very blurry and the true origin remains unknown. However, there are drawings of such a device that date back over five hundred years. Some mechanical varieties are dated up to 5,000 years ago!
Did you know that wooden structures built by the Romans hundreds of years ago used an early type of pile driver known as a "fistuca" and are still around today? These structures are a testament not only to Roman ingenuity, but also to the amazing achievements that can be realized with pile driver technology.
The diesel hammer has been a workhorse of pile driving for decades, and with good reason. The hammer utilizes forces from both gravity and the diesel combustion, which helps make it a very efficient machine, and improvements over the years have made them clean-burning as well.
The hydraulic hammer is a new-age pile driver that replaces the diesel hammer. This device is more environmentally friendly and creates slightly less noise. Although, the diesel is still more reliable and more familiar in the construction world.
When work requires adjusting for wetlands or similarly protected environments, piles can be used to create temporary trestles that transverse the area. Once the project is completed, the trestles and piles can be extracted and the region restored.
Sometimes external friction reducers are used in the pile driving process while pipe piles have to penetrate competent soils deeply. These shallow rings are attached to the outer pile circumference and work to temporarily reduce friction by creating a heavily disturbed zone in the above area.
The depth to which a pile must be installed depends on several factors, including environmental. Soils with high concentrations of variable fills (granular, sand, gravel) and/or compressive clays will require deeply set foundation pillars.
A hydraulic press-in pile driver is a type of specialty pile driver that is used to deep-press steel sheet piles into the ground with little to no vibration. Hydraulic press-in pile drivers can also be used with conventional pile driving rigs to pile two steel sheets at the same time.
Did you know that some of the greatest inventors claim to have invented the pile driver? This includes the watchmaker James Valoue. James Nasmyth also claimed to have invented a working pile driver as did the great Leonardo da Vinci.
Driven piles are manufactured and inspected according to standards established by the American Society for Testing and Manufacture (ASTM). As such, their superior materials and precise tolerances make them ideally suited for their specific applications.
In areas where there are noise and vibration limits on pile driving applications, using sonic, or super-high-frequency, technology is a viable alternative. Because it reduces vibrations to almost imperceptible levels, it can be used in areas that are off-limits to other methods.
When did the very first drawing of a workable, mechanically correct pile driver first appear in literature? In 1475. The drawing of the pile driver was discovered in a treatise – “Trattato di Architectura” – written by Francesco di Giorgio Martini.
A hydraulic pile driver uses hydraulic fluid and a powerful engine to drive the hammer into the pile. They pollute a lot less than a diesel hammer, and are noticeably quieter. They also mitigate the vibration on the pile, which is important if there are surrounding buildings.