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News about EQ-Force, Incorporated™, Updated 03-28-05
- EQ-Force will have a booth at the Structural Congress 2005 in New York City, April 20-23.
- Dick Berry has prepared a paper regarding the use of the EQ-Force process in combination with the priorities established by the IBC to provide reasonable protection while not costing as much as use of "California" standards would. That paper will also be published in Structure.
- We are publishing a paper on the interrelation of soil nailing and the EQ-Force array. The processes enhance each other and produce greater safety factor than either process alone. The paper is co-authored by Dick Berry of EQ-Force and Clay Griffin of Rembco, a leading installer of soil nailing. It will appear in SEA magazine, Structure.
Both papers are available for the asking.
- EQ-Force has joined the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations (NCSEA). In joining, we will be supporting the Council of American Structural Engineers (CASE), which publishes Structure magazine. CASE committees are concerned with IBC codes as they affect seismic and wind standards.
- For those of you who are imminently planning to carry out some form of soil support work for footings and structures in earthquake endangered areas, or in structures where construction upgrades are needed, you should look at the EQ-Force array now. You should evaluate the option of using mini-piles instead of caissons. You will gain seismic safety and code compliance at the same time.
Our research agreement with the civil engineering department of Michigan Technological University continues. The chief investigator is Professor Stanley Vitton, a geotechnical engineer with some twenty years experience with Shell Oil's Exploration and Production effort, and who is an expert in seismology and explosives. Our effort is directed toward optimizing the spatial arrangement of mini-piles in order to make the results more predictable and less costly.
The first full scale tests will be carried out in a sixty foot deep mine tailings area with completely consistent soil. After that, small modeling work will be conducted using both a shaking table and a geotechnical centrifuge.
US Patent # 6,659,691 was issued on December 9, 2003. Its title is "Pile Array Assembly System for Reduced Soil Liquefaction."
- The research group presented a technical paper at the 4th National Seismic Conference and Workshop on Bridges and Highways held in Memphis, Tennessee from February 9-11, 2004. We have a reprint of this initial research paper available for the asking.
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