ABSTRACT
Pile foundations fulfill a dominant role in foundation construction. Driven prefabricated concrete piles are in this respect used on a worldwide scale. The driving of such piles should be done in an efficient way in order to limit public nuisance, while at the same time care should be taken that the driving stresses do not surpass the strength of the pile. During driving many parameters can be deduced and by a clever use of the observed values it might ultimately be possible to predict the pile’s static bearing capacity with an acceptable degree of accuracy. By making use of electronic data acquisition, fit for site use, very detailed information can be collected continuously. The cost thereof are small enough, not to affect competition. Until now, electronic data collection has been the domain of the specialists and mainly due to the limited scale of application, the degree of accuracy of such predictions is still too low to be used as the only source of information.
