12-13-09 Completed Project and Research Paper

I have finally completed the project and have finished all the slides. Below is my research paper:

Every year thousands of homes in the world are being destroyed, not due to only hurricanes and other natural disasters, but a common element, Soil. As constructers make very profound mistakes on the soil and surface they choose to build on, more and more buildings are being destroyed due to a bad foundation.

Constructorsand Construction managers have an important task of choosing the right surface to build the building on. Many times there are costly mistakes by them that cause a bad foundation. The surface type is very important when it is time to build. The most common surface types to build a building on are soil,topsoil,sand, and clay. Every type of surface type has their own maximum strength that it can hold, which is called bearing capacity. The bearing capacity is the capacity of soil to support the loads applied to the ground. Often constructers fail to undermine the amount the surface type can hold, and therefore once the building is made, usually gets destroyed within a couple of years. Using a pentrometer, constructers can accurately measure the strength of soil and how far it will penetrate within certain conditions. Constructers need to find the best surface area and the surface type with the greatest strength in any condition in order to maximize the life on the building.

The bearing capacity of the surface area is important to find as it is a crucial factor in determining the life of a building. Often times, constructers choose the wrong surface area with a small amount of strength and causes the foundation to either slide or crack, and eventually break. This can be a very dangerous problem and costly, as people may get hurt or you have to fix the house again. They must fix this problem, or every year thousands of more homes will get destroyed.

December 11, 2009

Its been a while since I have last blogged as I haven't gotten a chance. Today I have completed 2/3 of my project and I used topsoil instead of plain soil. The topsoil contained a large amount of rocks and was definitely harder than plain soil. After testing the soil in the same format as the regular soil I came to these conclusions: The topsoil soil is a great soil to have a foundation built in, when its dry. When the topsoil gets a large amount of water added to it, it quickly becomes a wetland and it strength dissapears. The first soil I used retained it strength despite adding the same amount of water to it. Tomorrow I plan to complete the last part of the experiment using sand which foundations are built on constantly. I hope to finish it tomorrow and complete my data charts and complete the project.

December 04, 2009

Today I have finally started to do my project. The last couple of days with the help of my friends, Mario and Burak, I was able to create my so called machine to start the project. Today I tested the soil aspect of it. I tested the strength of the soil with 300 ml weight, 600 ml, and 900 ml. I changed the amount of water ( half a jug in one box and full jug in another ) and tested it with 300 600 and 900 again. At first I tried for a while to analyze the data and i was confused. I am still preety confused but looking at the data, I have made a conclusion that despite the amount of water added to the soil, there is not a considerable difference on how much it penetrated in the soil. Despite even changing the amount of weight 300 600 or 900, and it still remained a constant amount of meters into the soil. Tommarow I plan on testing sand.