Piling

the calculaton, Setting-out and as-built of 13,000 piles...

Over an 18mnth period three Lansdowne engineers were responsible for the calculation of and setting-out of 13,000 piles (pre-cast driven, cfa and ldp) at the Westfield Stratford City project. The shopping centre itself is siuated btwn the Stratford Bus, tube & train stations an d the London 2012 Olympic Park in the very heart of Stratford, East London.

The engineers were embedded into the Balfour Beatty Ground Engineering team and were responsible for all calculation, dimensional control and surveying tasks associated within the contract. With so many areas on the go at once and with numerous rigs and forms of piling being carried out, the revisions were many and frequent.

A senior engineer was responsible for calculating each area (and the subsequent revisions) and passing the info onto the relevant team. This same SE was then also responsible for collating all as-built data collected in the field; producing 'comparison spreadsheets' and publishing this to the appropriate BBGE Contracts Engineer. Areas could then be handed over to the client.

Being such a large open site, it was decided that the setting-out of the pre-cast and cfa piles would be done with gps. Two Leica 900 Series gps rovers were purchased, and run from a single base station located on the roof of the site office. This enabled the pc & cfa teams to set-out and survey quickly and efficiently, with minimal set-up time. The ldp part of the project was set-out with a Leica 1200 total station.

below: one of the many as-built spreadsheets completed during the project