There's a reason we keep stockpiles of C33 sand on our dam sites for emergencies. There's not really a better gradation material for filtering soil, outside of extremes in coarse and fine grained soil. Even with some of the clay foundations I've worked on with >90% passing the #200 sieve, the...
I'm not really aware of any rules of thumb for horizontal displacement. the "1%" rule is generally used for vertical settlement of embankment dams under 200-feet (USBR DS13-9 section 9.3.2).
Horizontal displacement is a bit more complicated. Are you wanting to know the displacement at the...
Caltrans would solve this problem using Isolation Casings. This requires the bents be founded on pile extension columns, using drilled shafts. The shorter column would have an isolation casing drilled larger diameter than the column to extend the column length below ground. This is also more...
I can second that. I am working on a large post-tensioned anchor job with 5000 psi grout for the bond and unbonded zones. Our biggest issue has been the consistency of curing and testing from the contractor's QC lab; their lab would sometimes give lower strengths compared to our QA lab. Even...
And for the very Nerdy among us, I found a Ph.D. thesis published during earlier parts of the Millennium Tower debacle regarding the engineering properties of the Old Bay Clay.
This link should provide a download, but my work network provides me with a lot of access to journals so I don't know...
I was pursuing the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering and saw a free paper published in March on the Case History of the Millennium Tower. It was first submitted two years ago (July 12 2021) so it doesn't capture the recent developments but does describe the foundation...
I am aware of AeroAggregate and have been before this incident. My job working on Embankment Dams has given me a lot of experience working with compaction, aggregate, and compaction of large aggregate. Voids will be present for any aggregate. If this were to be backfillled with gravel there will...
New Article in ENR. After 15 Years, Settlement Arrested at San Francisco's Millennium Tower
It sounds like the EDRT accepts the work and feels the fix is sufficient. An interesting thing I noted is that Ron Hamburger says that the condo homeowners are the ones who asked to scale back the 52...
When dealing with aggregate as large as the foamed glass aggregate being used here, there is not much compactive effort needed. Large aggregate is usually dense when placed, and will get denser with a little compaction. In fact, just driving equipment across the material will help compact it...
No it’s not LCC. The article said they backfilling with straight glass.
I’ve heard of AeroAggregate in the past couple of years as a new aggregate. I guess they found their big break.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, this has happened in the Bay Area famously. Here's a good short documentary of the fire and subsequent incredibly rapid reconstruction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TKjwblp1XI
In the Oakland case, the fault was on the driver. The driver and company lost...
This is in BeamNG, like GregLocock said. It's probably the only true soft body physics car simulator. And it is a full simulator, everything from the engine (oil temps, coolant temps, cylinder wall temps, head gasket, piston and con rod stress) to tires to body deformation is actually simulated...
That has been my understanding. The jack pressure can be varied to maintain the max 1300kip load.
Another thing being forgotten in this conversation is the built in fuse system. Loads over 1300 Kip would fail the fuse to limit the load on the piles and mat. See Pyke’s paper posted by Walnuts...
It makes sense to me, but I am more than a tad silly.
Say you have a footing for a bridge located at the toe of an embankment, the passive pressure acting on that footing would be conservative if it was overestimated; you would design for that larger loading on the footing.
If you need the...
It's not necessarily an easily searched database, but CALTRANS geotechnical has a web portal that includes all of their geotechnical related reports, boring logs, drawings, foundation testing, etc. It is mapped by location so its best if you have a certain area you are looking at. If anyone is...
