The ASTM International requirements are for the chemical,
physical and mechanical requirements the designer specifies to
meet the project demands of the steel piling. There are also manufacturing
QA/QC policies and procedures that a manufacturer
must follow. These policies and procedures usually follow a version
of the International Standards Organization (ISO) along with
company-specific requirements, dependent on the jurisdictional
requirements and ethos of the company. As an example, there are
EPA requirements in manufacturing, but a company may have
pledged to be an environmental steward to their community, and
therefore, their standards will be more stringent than governmental
regulations.
In addition to the above QA/QC procedures and meeting
ASTM or other standards, the material must also conform to the
minimum requirements of the Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ).
This could be a city, county, state or country where the project
is located.
For many projects, piling may require fabrication. If so, then
the fabricator may have to be certified by another governing body
(such as AISC or CISC), while each welder will have their own
certification requirements (AWS or CSA). Of course, this is all
dependent upon the project specifications required by the owner
or designer.
It is true that with technological advances, there is more automation
in the steelmaking process which leads to improved quality
control. This has afforded steel to have a higher factor of safety
when comparing it to other materials. This is not by accident, as
the industry has been transformed by an array of testing methodologies
(many adopted by ASTM) that afforded the steel industry
to better understand how steel piling interacts with soil.
In the last century, steel has greatly advanced within the driven
pile industry. As innovations in equipment, procedures and technology
continue to transform how we work, rest assured that steel
will be a part of the equation. t
QA/QC – STEEL
Table 1: Available steel
grades for SSP and HZM
Table 2: Available steel
grades for H-piles
Table 3: Available steel grades for pipe piles
106 | ISSUE 3 2021 www.piledrivers.org
/www.piledrivers.org
