Dynamic Probing

Dynamic soil penetration tests are extensively used in fieldwork by geologists and geotechnicians due to their ease and speed of use and their low cost. This program offers tools for the recording, processing and archive the tests in an interactive graphic environment supported by a database of methods and parameters.

The graphic display and process support enables the terrain to be catalogued, parameterized and compared with adjacent soil tests to gain an insight of the stratigraphy encountered.

The soil penetration test provides fairly precise information regarding the depth of boundary levels in the substrata, depth of water table, breach surfaces on slopes as well as the general consistency of the soil.

The use of the data should be treated with caution and critical discrimination augmented by local geotechnical knowledge.

Correlations

Results of correlations for cohesionless soils are certainly more reliable than those for cohesive ones as cohesive soils are influenced by drainage to a greater extent, while the rapid test occurs in saturated state with consequent lesser reliability. In any case the in situ dynamic test enables a more reliable parametrization of cohesionless loose soils which, as is well known, do not permit undisturbed sampling.

Interpretation of bar chart

Viewing the bar chart graphic, anomalous number of blows can easily be recognized as stray encounters, and not used in the average for the layer. In the same way fills will reveal themselves by anomalous readings.

There is no need to recall the criticism nor praise that this methodology has received in specialized literature. However we believe that in the light of the vast experience gained, with good interpretation and correlation, data useful for design is often obtained, and often the data is more reliable than any number of bibliographies of lithologies or geotechnical data derived from a few laboratory tests that attempt to represent verticals of heterogeneous, non uniform and complex components.