Site Investigation with Piezocone and Mini-Cone Testing: Some Practical Examples

Abstract

The electrical cone penetration and piezocone testing have become increasingly popular for in situ testing in site investigation and geotechnical design. The advances in electronics and computer engineering created smaller, stronger and cheaper devices that have been incorporated to some investigation tools. It contributed for the piezocone testing to be an unequaled logging tool with respect to the delineation of stratigraphy and the continuous quick estimative of soil mechanical parameters. This paper briefly presents the piezocone and the minecone testing. At the last years the piezocone has been used as a logging tool for geo-environmental site investigation, and the mini-cone gives finer details compared to the standard cone, making it more attractive for transportation infrastructure investigation. Some cases histories, where the piezocone were used to identify zones from the soil mass contaminated by salt, and the mini-cone were used to detect failure surface to assess slope stability of a landfill based on back-analysis technique, are presented and discussed. This paper is finished with some comments about the necessity of additional research to adjust this recent and modern technology for site investigation of Brazilian tropical soils.