File: Pile Driving Analyzer Pros and Cons
PDA testing has become a regular part of pile installation on projects in southeastern Virginia especially on waterfront projects. VDOT promtes its use of bridge projects and it is more frequently specified on small projects as well. In addition, it has become increasingly used as a complete substitute for the traditional pile load test.
3 Comments
Atef El saba
Atef El saba
In my opinion the biggest effort in the future should go to search in the effect of the pile group action , that is more efficient than focus on the individual pile bearing capacity
IMED LACHHEB
It was very interesting for me as I'm currently working on a bridge project in Benin inwhich we are applying PDA testing. The site is so heterogeneous that we dicided to put instrumentation on each pile. Design was giving effectively higher predictions. Unfortunately, for economic reason, we didn't carry on a static load testing to compare results but surely, as you said, Bearing capacity of pile measured with PDA will be underpredicting.
Let me add also that we made "restrike driving tests" after 1-2 days of stopping driving operation and they have shown increasing on bearing capacity due to "cicatrization effect". So that confirms the underpredicting specificity of PDA method.
Very good & useful paper , i think that the statement "
We should remember that we are using a dynamic method to evaluate a static
property."
is the final say in this topic