ISSN: 1945-7545
CODEN: GTJODJ
Page Count: 8

Design and Performance of a Portable Piezocone Driver for High Resolution Profiling of Wetland Sediments

Zeeb, PJ
HSI GeoTrans, Inc., Harvard, MA

Hemond, HF
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

Germaine, JT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

Abstract

A portable piezocone driver was designed and built for use on wetland deposits that cannot support the weight of conventional truck-mounted equipment. The driver has successfully pushed a standard piezocone to the bottom of a wetland deposit at depths ranging from 2 to 8 m, including thick sand lenses. Records of penetration pore pressure and point resistance from these explorations distinguish several different types of peat, an underlying organic deposit, and sand strata. These results demonstrate that a piezocone can be driven through thick wetland deposits without a truck-mounted rig and that the data collected can be used to map deposit-scale heterogeneities in the wetland soil type.

Keywords:
wetlands, piezocone, penetrometer, in-situ testing

Paper ID: GTJ10738J
DOI: 10.1520/GTJ10738J
ASTM International is a member of CrossRef.