The project site is located in the heart of the entertainment district in Arlington, Texas – home of the Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Rangers. The goal of the project was to construct a Museum to preserve the legacies of Medal of Honor recipients. The project involved working with challenging geology to install deep foundations for this structure.
The approach for the project is to investigate and evaluate the geologic condition and come up with an alternate foundation design that can potentially eliminate the challenges associated with conventional cased drilled shafts. This involved communication between the general contractor, the structural engineer and Russo to present the viable option which has the added benefit of accelerating the schedule.
In lieu of the cased drilled shaft, Russo proposed installation of Auger Cast Pile (ACIP). Upon receiving the loading requirement, Russo designed the ACIP to replace the drilled piers. The major concern was the highly loaded mega column piers. However, Russo’s expert design team ensured that the ACIPs are more than capable to carry those loads. Depending on the load requirement the ACIPs needed to socket up to 15.0 feet into the hard gray shale with cemented sand seams.
To demonstrate the installation procedure and as part of design verification, we recommended to perform three pre-production sacrificial load tests.
The test piles performed better than expected with none of the piles exceeding more than half of an inch movement under twice the design load. The project was completed without any issue and a good number of days was saved in the schedule.
