Use of the Osterburg Cell load testing as a post construction quality control test for bored and cast In-situ concrete piles in Sri Lanka.

Abstract

Economy, reliability and amount of information gathered from post construction quality control load testing of piles playa vital role in design and construction practices of bored piles. The piling industry and in particular, the geotechnical engineering community of Sri Lanka should be on the look-out for methods to improve the present practices in design, construction and post construction testing by way of introducing appropriate new methodologies. One such relatively recent practice that was adopted in post construction quality controlling is the load testing of piles using high strain dynamic load testing. That introduction revolutionized the design and testing of bored piles in Sri Lanka. Therefore, in this paper it is aimed at investigating the adoptability of relatively new post onstructional pile load testing methodology adopted in other countries of the world, namely, Osterburg cell testing. The paper focuses mainly on the procedure of this test and the applicability of such testing method to bored and cast in-situ concrete piles in Sri Lanka. Presently available data is analyzed to identify the situations, where Osterburg testing method can be adopted and attention is also paid to investigate the limitations of the above testing procedure as far as the testing of bored piles in Sri Lanka are concerned. Furthermore, the load-settlement behavior of an actual bored pile is numerically modeled and the probable results of an Osterburg cell test are also presented.