What are Soil Nails and Micro Piles, and what are their applications?
Micro-Piles are high tensile-strength, threaded steel rods which are embedded in the earth during or after drilling for the purpose of supporting heavy loads and/or tension loads, such as a building foundation, radio towers, and wind energy plants. Micro-Piles are also used when there are utility or property easement conflicts that do not allow other shoring systems to work. In those situations, vertical systems like Micro-Piles are commonly utilized.
Soil Nails are all-thread steel bars inserted into the earth through rotary or percussion drilling and installed at a designed angle (usually 15 degrees). They are then held in the center of the drilled hole with centralizers while the hole is pumped full using a high-strength grout. The grout is delivered from the bottom of the drilled hole to the top to fully encapsulate the soil nail. When the mix has taken the proper set (typically 72 hours) a percentage of the installed soil nails are given a pull test to determine if they meet the design specifications for the design application.
Some soil nails are applied through slope conditions to stabilize the earth for slope face protection and global stability. Others are drilled and inserted through layers of rock to tie them together to create a global stability and slope face control. This is commonly referred to as "rock bolting".
Thorcon Shotcrete and Shoring will deliver any application of soil nail or micro-pile design through our wide variety of small, limited-access drills to our large track mounted fleet. We serve clients throughout Colorado and the surrounding region.
