Design and construction of driven piles on the East Coast of Australia
Henry Zhang
Large diameter (> 900 mm) driven tubular steel piles have become increasingly popular for the support of buildings, bridges and other structures in recent years. This is largely due to their relative ease of installation, and comparatively high capacity and low cost. Such piles have played an important role in the completion of the large number of bridges within the Pacific Highway upgrade project. This presentation will discuss a number of case histories where driven steel tubular piles have been utilised within recent highway upgrade projects, specifically at sites across the East Coast of Australia. Common practice, challenges with design, installation and quality assurance via Pile Dynamic Analyzer (PDA) test and pile dynamic monitoring (PDM) will be discussed; the drivability, unit shaft and base resistance in soil, weak rock and hard rock as indicated from PDA tests will be discussed and compared with published data.
About the speaker
Henry Zhang WSP, Technical Executive, Geotechnics
Henry is a Technical Executive, Geotechnics with WSP. He has over 20 years of professional experience in geotechnical engineering design and construction in Australia, Singapore and China. Henry has broad experience in geotechnical design on foundations, soft ground improvement, slope stability, deep excavations and retaining walls and finite element analysis on complex soil-structure interaction.
Henry’s leading technical skills have been demonstrated by recent publications in the proceedings of International Conference on Soft Ground Engineering (ICSGE 2015), AGS Symposium 2015, 2016 & 2018, the 15th Australasian Tunnelling Conference 2014, Piling & Deep Foundations Conference 2014 & 2015.
Henry has worked as Lead Designer/Subject Matter Expert on soft ground and piling within the Pacific Complete (PC) team for the $4.3b Woolgoogla to Ballina (W2B) Pacific Highway Upgrade project for the last 3.5 years, delivering 100 bridges over 155 km in challenging ground. Major geotechnical challenges within the W2B project have included the quick construction of significant embankments on soft ground and driven/bored piles terminating in soil, weak rock and hard rock.
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