Caltrans Sacramento Field Test

The State of California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has commissioned a full scale field test of base grouted piles north of Sacramento. The research team includes representatives from Caltrans, the University of Missouri, and UC Berkeley. The project includes the installation of 13 drilled shafts, including 4 test shafts which will be load tested after grouting. UC Berkeley is performing thermal and strain monitoring of the curing, grouting, and load testing using distributed fiber optics. In addition to those pictures below, the Berkeley team includes Prof Kenichi Soga, Andrew Yeskoo, Dr. Amr Ewais, and Dr. Linqing Luo.

 

Photo 1: Professor Kenichi Soga and doctoral student Andrew Yeskoo stand next to one of 13 drilled shafts installed for the project. This pile is instrumented with distributed fiber optic lines to monitor temperature and strain, in addition to conventional vibrating wire instrumentation.

Photo 2: Base grouting of 1 of 4 test shafts underway. In addition to the distributed fiber optic monitoring being performed by the UC Berkeley team, Professor Erik Loehr and research engineer Andrew Boeckmann (pictured left) of the University of Missouri are performing conventional instrumentation monitoring, including vibrating wire strain measurements, optical leveling at the top of the pile, and extensometers to measure pile compression. Tom Shantz (pictured right) is a senior research engineer at Caltrans and is the project lead.