GeoTools - Organization and insight into your CPT's

"GeoTools enables us to quickly gain insight into the available site investigation. By generating longitudinal profiles, we quickly have an overview of the soil structure of the project location. We can then zoom in on the specific components and, for example, compare CPTs." - Sjoerd Bouwmans, Project Advisor Geotechnics & Gijs van Gorp, Advisor Geotechnics at Heijmans

A tour of GeoTools:

Centralize and organize CPT's

GeoTools helps you centralize, interpret, inspect, modify, and use your project’s CPT collection, all within one app! Whatever your project is about, there are some aspects of working with CPT’s that reccur each time. CPT’s form the basis for many different calculations. They have to be interpreted, that is to say translated into a soil profile. The soil profile can then form the basis for various calculations, e.g. pile foundations calculations, dyke stability calculations, sheet piling calculations and much more.

The GeoTools application is web-based, so whenever you upload CPT’s to it, anyone that has internet access and is invited to the app can work with the CPT’s. You can select what type of classification method is used, which includes the standard Robertson method, a fully customisable Table method based on user-provided soil characteristics, and even a Machine Learning algorithm developed by CRUX. On the level of a single CPT, you can inspect the created soil layout and the measurement signals in the file. You can also download/upload .xml files of CPT’s, as a first step towards being compatible with the Bureau Registratie Ondergrond (BRO).

Customize and interpret CPT's

During every step of the process, VIKTOR will automate processes for you but you always have the option to modify or update parts of the project as you like. To help you decide on whether or not you are happy with the interpretation or other aspects, data is visualised in lots of different ways. Be it on a map, a 3D view of CPT’s, single or comparison plots of measurement data and soil interpretations. Finally, there is a PDF view that draws your CPT’s based on your specifications (paper size, scale, etc.), giving you a way to include the CPT’s into any report right away.

After the interpretation is to your liking, you can group CPT’s together in what is called a section. You do so by drawing a line on your mapview and all CPT’s that fall into the (adjustable) region of this line can be combined into a section. Within a section, you can work towards actually using the CPT’s.

D-Foundations

A straightforward example is the export to D-Foundations, which will result in a D-Foundations file that has all your CPT data already loaded into it, so that all you have to do is create your piles.

D-Settlement

Then there is an export to D-Settlement. Before making this export, VIKTOR helps you create a longitudonal (2D, interpolated) soil layout. To do so, you can first look at a visualization of all CPT’s in the section projected along the line that section is based on. A connection is made in the GeoTools with the Algemeen Hoogtebestand Nederland (AHN), which can be requested by VIKTOR to draw the height along the line in the plot. This visualisation gives you a good starting point to see which guide layers should be used for the longitudonal profile. After determining these guide layers and transferring them to a table automatically (which you can again fully modify and adjust as you see fit), the 2D profile can be visualised. Happy with the result? Export it to D-Settlement directly to continue working on some calculations.

Open-source functionality

The different functionality that are incorporated in GeoTools will also be made available as seperate open-source Python projects in VIKTOR's GitHub repository, such as:

• Map-based AHN elevation visualization
• CPT comparison
• CPT interpretation with Robertson
• Geotechnical section