Automatic Controlled Vibratory Pile Driving with Shock-Stress Limitation

For several decades vibratory pile driving has been extensively applied in civil engineering, e.g. in the construction of bulkheads. On urban construction sites shock waves occur which could damage nearby building structures and annoy humans. State-of-the-art machinery provides three control inputs (frequency, excitation force and surcharge force) to achieve two almost contradictory goals: fast pile penetration and shock stress below given limits (e.g. by DIN 4150). A nonlinear model explains the impact of all three control inputs on the quasi-stationary pile movement, such as penetration rate and oscillation amplitude. A fuzzy conntroller based on quantitative model-derived relations between control inputs and penetration rate is designed and implemented. In a second step the fuzzy controller is extended by an shock-stress limiting component