Underwater noise reduction of marine pile driving using a double pile.

Details

• Creators:
  Reinhall, Per G. ; Dardis, Tim ; Dahl, Peter H.
• Corporate Creators:
  Washington State Transportation Center
• Corporate Contributors:
  United States. Federal Highway Administration
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  Field Tests Finite Element Method Noise Control Pile Driving Piles (Supports) Sound Transmission Underwater Sound
• Publication/ Report Number:
  WA-RD 849.1
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  Washington
• Corporate Publisher:
  Washington (State). Dept. of Transportation
• Abstract:
  Impact pile driving of steel piles in marine environments produces extremely high sound levels in the water.
  
  It has been shown that current pile driving noise attenuation techniques, such as bubble curtains and
  
  cofferdams, provide limited noise reduction because significant noise is transmitted through the sediment
  
  into the water. Similarly, the effectiveness of surrounding the pile in the water with a double walled steel
  
  tube was shown in an earlier WSDOT study to be limited. To address this problem, a double walled pile has
  
  been developed to decrease the total noise transmitted into the water. The double walled pile consists of two
  
  concentric tubes connected by a special driving shoe, with an air gap between the two tubes. The double
  
  walled pile is driven into the sediment by using traditional equipment to strike the inner tube only. The air
  
  gap between the inner and outer tube prevents the radial deformation wave produced by the pile hammer
  
  from interacting with the water and the sediment. This report discusses the design of the double wall pile and
  
  presents the results from finite element modeling of the pile, scaled prototype testing, and full-scale field
  
  testing in Commencement Bay, Puget Sound, Washington. The tests showed that the double walled piles
  
  reduce the peak sound pressure over 20 dB relative to single walled piles at a range of approximately 8
  
  meters. They also showed that, in contrast, only a 3- to 6-dB reduction is obtained when a bubble curtain is
  
  used on a full-scale, single walled pile.
  
  
• Format:
  PDF
• Funding:
  Agreement T1461, Task 11
• Collection(s):
  US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:5d6a40c6ec4fe63c745c1d39bdd7cb428357887ad24adfe77df10e0da2098d34
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/29660/dot_29660_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 5.33 MB ]