YieldPoint

Geotechnical Instrumented Cable

The dCable technology provides engineers, technicians, consultants and contractors with a digital instrumented 7-strand cable for geotechnical monitoring.  It has the potential to help predict the risk of catastrophic structural failure: in fact dCable data can enhance many aspects of engineering design, installation quality control, long-term operation assessment, and rehabilitation. Through a direct measurement of deformation, it tracks how the load develops along its own length over time, and allows a reliable assessment of the Factor of Safety against cable rupture.

 

Almost indistinguishable from a regular cable, its installation simply involves replacing a regular cable with its instrumented equivalent. The readout head of the dCable has the same diameter as the 7-wire strand itself, and therefore grips and a jack can be applied over the readout head if the cable is to be plated. If no face-plate is required the readout head can simply be recessed into the collar of the hole.

dCable Tech

The dCable is based on a miniature borehole extensometer manufactured into a surrogate tubular king-wire.

 

A total of up to six miniaturized extensometric wires are affixed to the king-wire at nodal locations  x1,x2……x6.  The translation of the six wires is measured by 6 inductive displacement sensors at the head of the device. As the cable stretches each displacement sensor measures the relative displacement between the head and the nodal point (u1u2 ….u6).

 

The difference between adjacent nodal points can be used to calculate the strain of the cable, and this is converted to load in tonnes. The VantagePoint software platforms delivers these metrics and views automatically.