During construction in urban areas often noise and vibrations are not tolerated. For the installation of the foundation piles in these cases there is often chosen for screwed displacement piles. These piles can be installed without nuisance for the vicinity, but do induce large soil displacements during installation. The soil displacements can cause increased soil pressure on adjacent structures. Because urban areas are getting more densely built, these problems will occur more often in the future. The effects can be minimilized when they are known in advanced. This research looks into the possibility of predicting the installation effects of screwed displacements piles on adjacent structures. This is divided in the prediction of the soil displacement in a finite element analysis and in the effect of the soil displacement on adjacent piles. This is done with two case studies. First data from tests in Shanghai is used to create a finite element model. After this measurements are done in Rotterdam to verify this model for Dutch cases.
Combining all the analysis of the measured and modelled displacements showed that the displacement is depended on the stiffness of the soil layers, the initial displacement at the edge of the pile and the distance from the pile. The soil parameters influence the initial displacements in each soil layers. When the initial displacements are correctly determined with tests, it is possible to predict the soil displacement due to the installation of a screw pile with a finite element model. No conclusion could be made on the effect of the soil displacements on adjacent structures. ... Read more

Japan and the Netherlands have very different physical, historical and cultural contexts but they share a vulnerability to extreme flood related events and have, in both their (relatively) recent pasts, had to recover from such events: be they the floods of 1953 in the Netherlands or the tsunami that hit Japan’s east coast in 2011. This paper describes the process and results of two workshops investigating flood reconstruction responses undertaken by students representing five disciplines at TU Delft in the Netherlands. A particular workshop method was employed to promote an interdisciplinary design process and then design responses investigated for the (very real) Japanese case were transferred to a hypothetical disaster scenario for Vlissingen, in the south of the Netherlands. The conclusions reached focused as much on the efficacy of the workshop method as the particular design proposals for both cases as well as on what was learnt via the comparison between Japanese and Dutch, contexts and reconstruction philosophies. ... Read more