Secant pile construction for Heathrow
Express Mott MacDonald has been involved with
numerous projects where piles have been used to form the
foundation. We have been involved at every stage of the design
process from assessment of the ground conditions, to pile selection
and design for capacity, to settlement prediction, back-analysis of
pile tests and working performance.
An enormous variety of piles are in use around the world today,
ranging from driven steel pin piles to large diameter cast-in-place
concrete piles more than 1.5m in diameter, including driven
pre-cast concrete and steel tube H-piles. One of the most important
elements of pile design is to select a pile type that is
appropriate not only to the ground and groundwater conditions but
also to site access and associated constraints. Our involvement in
major projects throughout the world gives us this experience,
together with the capability to predict pile performance employing
the full range of techniques from traditional empirical approaches
to methods based on the latest academic research.
Some of our key projects that have made us of pile design
include:
- Funchal Airport Extension (over 900 piles up to 1,500mm
diameter in pyroclastic and other volcanic rocks)
- Dublin Bay WWTW (tender design considering a wide variety all
pile-types in complex ground conditions)
- Aden Flour Mill (driven pre-cast concrete piles)
- LUL Earthworks Stabilisation (laterally loaded mini-piles
adjacent to operating railways)
- Heathrow Express Cofferdam (more than 180 secant piles 1,200mm
diameter supporting a 30m deep 60m diameter excavation)
- Heathrow Terminal 5 underground space design and
foundations
- N4 Eire (driven pre-cast concrete piles for road support over
peat
- Wembley Stadium
Pile testing at Heathrow Terminal 5
Delhi Metro
See our key work on this span bridge in Ireland
Read about our work on the A34 Chieveley
Providing special solutions