Reliability Evaluation of Cross-Hole Sonic Logging for Bored Pile Integrity

Abstract

Defects present in a pile may not be encountered during a cross-hole sonic logging (CSL) test. Even when defects are indeed encountered, they may not always be detected. This paper proposes a probabilistic analysis procedure for evaluating the reliability of CSL, thereby providing a theoretical supplement to existing experimental evaluations of CSL. The reliability of this integrity testing method is represented by the inspection probability, which is expressed as the product of the encountered probability and the detection probability. Mathematical models to calculate the encountered probability are formulated and a detection probability model is suggested based on existing CSL test data. Several examples are presented to illustrate the proposed procedure. The results indicate that there exists a minimum detectable defect size below which the defect cannot be inspected. For a given number of access tubes, the minimum detectable defect size, as a percentage of the pile cross-sectional area, decreases with the pile diameter. The encountered probability can be taken as an index to determine the required number of access tubes. When the target encountered probability is specified as 0.95, three and four access tubes will be sufficient to encounter defects larger than 15 and 5% of the pile cross-sectional area, respectively.