Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Scope of Testing and Research
Scope of Testing and Research
River (1973), shown in Figure 10. The benefit of the gravel pack again is as stated
above; however, this configuration must be suspended from, and lowered into the
excavation with the cage which could become extremely cumbersome in a production-
oriented setting.
Figure 10. Gravel pack between two steel plates (after Bolognesi and Moretto, 1973).
The laboratory testing is being conducted using a relatively new device called a
Frustum Confining Vessel (FCV) which provides a method of physically modeling pile-
type insitu stresses on small-scale piles without the use of a centrifuge. The device,
developed by Berminghammer Foundation Equipment in conjunction with McMaster
University (Sedran, 1999), is a conical-shaped steel vessel in which sands are placed and
stressed as shown in Figure 11. The resulting vertical and horizontal stress distributions
are reasonably similar to those of full-scale prototype piles. In the control volume
portion of the FCV stresses are distributed similar to those encountered in the field.
Some significant advantages of the FCV with respect to other physical modeling
13 Mullins, et al.