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Penetration testing in Denmark    esopt

A. Hansen    State-of-the-art report

During almost 50 years the Swedish drill-point sounding method has been generally adopted as sounding practice in connection with soil-in-vestigations in Denmark. There have been madę a few tests by the Dutch Cone Penetrometer and in the last years drop hammer sounding (system B0RR0S) has corne to use under special circum-stances.

In generał, however, the use of penetration testing is rapidly on its way out, due to the appearance of fast and economic drilling tech-niques. Among foundation engineers there is a growing understanding for the importance of the diversified soi! characteristics (geological origin, undrained shear strength, effective strength constants and compressibility characte-rlstics), which are not in any simple way re-lated to the resistance against penetrometers. Therefore the tendency is to prefer a few bore-holes instead of a great number of soundings.

We expect within few years the sounding practice to be limited to use in investigations for point bearing piłeś. Most likely the drop hammer method will be preferred due to the quantitative character of the results.

Soundings in great numbers for determination of qualitative variat1ons within a construction area are generally replaced by resist1vity ana-lyses, acoustic methods and boreholes drilled by highly mechanized equipment.