Structural upgrades are a positive gain for building managers. These upgrades usually come about due to years, sometimes decades of problems that have resulted in the decision to invest substantial time and money to remediate the issues. To complete the upgrade is a complete balancing act that seeks to find the equilibrium between scheduling contractors, permits, coordinating with the city, minimizing downtime, and interruptions to business. When a commercial building in Sacramento, CA was upgrading its utility box, all of these factors were considered in making a decision to work with EagleLIFT.
The utility box installation was taking place right next to a building’s grade beam that was supported by a deep foundation system. However, below the grade beam, nearly 20ft of pea gravel was being used as fill and to aid drainage below the building. While pea gravel served this purpose extraordinarily well, to excavate the material made for a shoring nightmare that would have led to substantial soil loss underneath the foundation. So the company needed to find a solution to shore the pea gravel for excavation.
Injection Rods at every 3' of depth up to 15' are installed to allow for injection of the geotechnical
EagleLIFT presented a plan to stabilize the pea gravel using its Deep Strata Injection (DSI) process. DSI is a process where a geotechnical polyurethane is injected to stabilize soils at depth, which is a perfect solution in this case. When a geotechnical polyurethane is injected into soil, the polymer initially travels in liquid form. This travel helps the polymer fill gaps and voids prior to expansion and with pea gravel, polyurethane has excellent permeation and stabilization potential due to relatively large gaps and voids.
An excavated portion of the pea gravel polyurethane matrix shows the permeation of the polyurethane and the resulting structural stability
Case Study: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/shoring-pea-gravel-polyurethane-injection-sacramento-california/?trackingId=CtKniVrDdLXoQIRiXgrCqg%3D%3D