How much organic material is floating in your sedimentation cylinder during the test? Can you burn off the organics and perform the test on the resulting "duplicate" sample? Then, compare the gradation curves and see what it tells you.
Have you inquired of the geotechnical engineer? There are many firms that use their own system of abbreviations. It's worth a phone call. The guide may be included in the report, and you just haven't located it.
There are limited LIDAR sites available in some areas. We use one to help determine whether a mapped earthquake fault is in the vicinity of a project site.
Some county offices have rough contours available on their GIS maps. My experience is that these are slightly better than using the USGS Topographic maps. Most of the civils I work for just trace the county contours onto the plan to start, until the survey crews can get to the site.
A graduating engineer with zero experience is going to start at the bottom and work their way through the foundational portions of the industry. Some of these tasks can seem mundane, unpleasant, and just plain miserable. Without some of these experiences, you won't turn into a good engineer...
Tell us more about these micropiles. Does their load carrying ability come exclusively from the soil to grout interaction? Are they end bearing into a stronger layer of soil/bedrock? Are the loads all compressive, or are there some tensile loads? What about steel within the element (size...
Sounds like you have a free-draining sand that will be placed similar to a "rock" fill. 5 cycles of vibratory compaction should give sufficient stability of the material. Will there be a pavement on top of this sand? How is it supposed to remain dry after placement?
I think the point has been missed. Nobody seems to like the update. This site used to be a great forum to discuss various topics and help one another find solutions.
Now, we can't find anything that we are used to viewing.
"I have an idea. Let's take something that is really popular and make...
If you construct a big block of concrete as shown in the above diagrams, where do you drain the water to from behind the wall?
The wall should have been constructed to a couple feet below finished grade. You may need to do some localized grading to bury the first couple rows of block, again...
The suppliers I have dealt with in the past try to make the fewest products that meet the widest range of standards. Example: they produce a #67 stone that can be used in concrete, or as drain rock.
Once everything has passed through the grinder pump, do you really have solid particles? The last one I designed was treated as regular water for all the calculations.
