BENATON Fundations

In 1935, Bennachio Piles, one of the largest pre-fabricated concrete pile companies, was founded in Brazil.
At first, it fabricated reinforced concrete piles, with square sections, which over the years were replaced by circular section piles. For a while, it also produced conical pile sections. These piles were driven by pile drivers fabricated with a wooden structure and equipped with free fall hammers. The movement was done through wooden planks structured to its frame.
In the early 70's, the company was sold to a financial group. A few years later its corporate name was changed to Paulista S/A Concrete Pre-molds and then to, Paulista Pile Company.

The company installed its factory in Cumbica - Guarulhos/SP, and began to produce solid piles, with load capacities varying between 20 and 80 tf, and gauges between 17 and 38 cm.

In the mid 80's, the company began to produce its own pile drivers, fabricating them with a metallic structure, completely standardized and equipped with 2,800-kg hammers.

It also stood out for being a pioneer in the fabrication of piles at the worksite itself – The mobile factory.

In the 90's, BENATON established itself in the segment of pre-fabricated concrete piles. 

BENATON currently fabricates piles with load capacities varying between 20 and 284 tf and sizes between15x15 and Ø70cm.
In order to obtain such pile sizes, BENATON currently relies on hammers varying from 2,800kg to 6,200kg.

Focused on client security and reliability, BENATON invests in Quality Control. It pioneered the use of a computer with sensors for pile driving analysis (PDA), a device used in the control of foundations, even before ABNT made it mandatory.

1930

PILE DRIVER
In the 30's, foundations were made with inadequate equipment. The machine was made of hardwood tripod, with a pulley at the top, where the pile was placed and pulled from the center to the side, being released in order to drop. With technological innovation, the Pile Driver evolved with the development of the electric Winch and later on, the diesel winch, a model that is still used.

1940

PILES
History marks the evolution of piles: from the Wooden Pile to Reinforced Concrete Piles.

1960

CYLINDRICAL PILES
The piles available on the market were reinforced square piles, when the process of cylindrical reinforced piles were introduced in Brazil.

1978

1980

PRESTRESSED HOLLOW

CYLINDRICAL PILES
BENATON is a pioneer in the fabrication of Prestressed Hollow Cylindrical Piles.

1985

WATER JET
Pre-drilling in helping the pile driving.
The water jet pre-drill system was developed to meet certain types of soil where it is necessary to get through very hard initial layers. BENATON has developed the dry pre-drilling system, which goes through layers with certain types of gravel.

1990

PDA + CAPWAP
The company pioneered the use of a computer with sensors for analysis.
Guarantee and reliability of the service executed: BENATON was the first company to import this equipment and use it in PDA (Pile Dynamic Analysis) analyses, even before its use was enforced by ABNT. It is currently the main method for confirming load support required in projects.

2000

MOBILE FACTORY

2nd Phase: Fabrication of Prestressed Piles directly at the worksite: 
Nowadays, BENATON fabricates prestressed piles directly at the client's worksite. Some of the advantages are: 
» cost reduction.
» logistical and quality improvement.
» reduction of the risk of cracks during transportations.
» tax reductions.
» reduction in construction time as a whole.

2010

BENATON: Developing technology and improving processes in major projects for over 40 years in Brazil and abroad.

Ready for delivery inventory

We maintain a regular inventory with all types of pile gauges and lengths in order to meet our clients' emergency orders.

Standard lengths: 6, 7, 8 and 10m.

BENATON Laboratory

BENATON, due to its philosophy of anticipating the market tendencies, constantly seeks for technological innovations, by investing in research, development and improvement in the fabrication and driving of pre-fabricated piles, always seeking to guarantee the best product and reliability of the best service.

BENATON Foundations Mobile Factory

BENATON, equipped with a mobile factory, makes the fabrication of piles at the worksite viable, and can provide services in both models:

Pile fabrication

Pile driver fabrication

Reducing costs for clients

The fabrication of concrete pieces at the worksite itself has become more frequent, making projects technically and commercially feasible, especially those removed from major urban and industrial centers.
With technical, manufacturing and operational capacity, BENATON is equipped to execute fabrication at the worksite itself, for example:

Part of Rio de Janeiro's Olympic Village street construction (60,000 meters of Ø 26cm piles)

SESC – Jacarepaguá – RJ pile embankment (140,000 meters of 20 x 20cm piles)

Government Palace in Asunción, Paraguay (10,000 meters of Ø 38cm piles)

Center Norte Shopping Mall – São Paulo (60,000 meters of Ø 20 cm and 44 x 44cm piles)

Advantages:

Eliminate high transportation costs of pieces produced in the factories.

Reduce the risk of cracks in the pieces resulting from transportation.

Reduce taxes (ICMS).

Reduce construction execution time as a whole.

All driving equipment is equipped with attached welding reconditioners (patent requested), dispensing with electric power at the worksite or the lease of generators for the execution of the trims.

Pile Drivers

Move over rolls, planks or belts

Have reinforced frames

Have reclining towers for free-fall hammers

Free fall

owers

Height varying from 5.0 to 14.0 mts depending on the project's needs.

Welding machine

TNT 8 Bambozzi, with 1,800 RPM's

Winches and Motors

Diesel motors - MWM D 229 - 4 (4 cylinders) with 50/55 HP and 1,800 RPM's

Winches: GHD 2000 (ET), GHD 3000 (22 Equipment units), GHD 5000 (01 Equipment unit)

Equipment protection

The equipment must have collective protection (belt, pulley and gear, radiator fan protectors) and an exhaust pipe silencer (to reduce noise and pressure)

Helmets, caps, cushions and supplements

Have a geometry that is appropriate for the pile section so as not to present excessive gaps and damage the pile head or even the pile itself.

Adaptation of the hammer weight for each type of pile.

Use heavier hammers with lower drop height, considering the same absorption system. For free falling hammers, we must obey the following rules:

Hammer weight = 0.70

Pile weight

Used for the driving of piles, pile drivers that move over rolls. These pile drivers are constituted of reinforced frames and rigid tower for the use of a "free fall" hammer.

So that the dynamic tensions, which occur as a result of the hammer's impact onto the pile head, can be distributed uniformly, a metallic helmet is installed between the hammer and the top of the pile (head), a metallic helmet with a hardwood cap with fibers that are parallel to the piles axis, over which the hammer falls. The cushion is installed inside the helmet. The cushion is a circular plate, with the same diameter as the pile being driven, usually made of plywood.

The pile driving begins by positioning the pile driver at the center of the pile to be driven. The tower is then aligned, the hammer, along with the helmet is raised to the top of the tower, and with the auxiliary cable, and the pile is brought to the tower. It is then positioned over the circle drawn on the ground, whose center is located over the position where the pile will be driven.

The hammer, along with the helmet, is lowered until it has been positioned onto the pile head, as long as the soft wood cushion has been placed between the head and the helmet.

After this operation is performed, the pile alignment is controlled with the plumb line and the driving begins. The concrete element joints are done by means of electrogenic welding, obeying the following recommendations:

The element to be welded is positioned over the element that has already been driven, carefully aligned, so as to have the circumferential pile plate rings perfectly settled.

After the positioning is done, the rings are cleaned with the proper metallic brush, in order to remove soil, oil or grease that might exist.

With the weld reconditioning attached to our equipment, the client saves on electric power and enables that the piles be driven at locations without electric power.

Procedure for the execution of joints

Used when the pile's final length is greater than the height of the tower;

Position the component to be welded, properly aligned over the pile that was previously driven, in order to have the perimetral settling of the plate rings and guarantee the axis of the joined parts;

Check the top of the bottom pile: If it is damaged, we recommend that it be repaired and wait for as long as it takes to restart the driving;

Clean the rings with a metallic brush, remove grease, oil and dirt;

Perform the welding with electrodes that are smaller or equal to the thickness of the weld;

Although the load capacity is evaluated in the project by using Empirical Statistics Methods, the capacity control of pile loads is traditionally done by means of the refusal of the pile to penetrate the soil associated to a certain driving energy (bearing).

The depth reached is considered to be satisfactory when the structural element refuses to penetrate the soil, obtaining a predetermined "bearing" based on Dynamic Driving Formulas.

In daily practice, if the bearings are not satisfactory, the pile is refused. What happens is that since the bearing is only one indicator of impenetrability of the structural element into the soil, the best use for such criterion, consists in Quality Control and Homogeneity of the pile driving and not in the evaluation of the piles load capacity (item 7.2.3.4. NBR 6122/96).
Examples:

Pre-drill with Water Jet System

In certain types of soil, especially those that are typically sedimentary and present thick layers of soft clay, it is necessary to execute pre-drilling beforehand, permitting the driving of piles without the risk of them breaking while penetrating the layer of compacted sand.

This is a pre-drill system that facilitates the driving of a pile in a layer of soil composed of large quantities of gravel.

When gravel is found in large quantities in a certain layer of thick soil, this can result in the impossibility of surpassing this layer.

In such cases, the use of augers or drill points is not usually solutions that can overcome the layer in question. 

This system is executed by a drilling machine, optional to the traditional method using pre-drilling with a water jet.

With the advantage of obtaining an average speed, in the pre-drilling process, two to three times greater that with the water jet. Thus, we increase the pile driving speed, reducing the project's execution time.

In certain types of soil, after the execution of the drilling, there is a large incidence of wall collapsing, creating a new obstruction for the passage of piles.

With this system, during the lowering and hole-opening procedure, the perforation tool breaks through the hard intermediary layers of soil, which were making the passage of the piles difficult.

On a daily basis, concrete testing bodies are molded, and by means of their breakage, the end product quality is controlled, ensuring that the project resistances are met (35 MPa).

The water/cement factor (W/C), used in the trace adopted by the company, is situated between 0.42 and 0.45, allowing for low permeability, characterized by a water absorption factor between 4 and 5%.

The piles are prestressed with state-of-the-art German equipment. All piles are prestressed thread by thread, thus allowing a strictly uniform distribution of tension in each one of them, permitting excellence in quality from unmolding to driving.

The steel used in the pre-stress procedure is RN-150 and RN-175, grooved and relieved of tension, with widths of 5, 6 and 8 mm, and resistance limits greater than 150 kgf/mm2 and 175 kgf/mm2.

All piles are fabricated with metallic rings, concreted together with the piece. Such rings, besides providing unlimited pile driving lengths, due to the possibility of joints, also guarantee good performance during the driving.

For a perfect and safe bond of the joints, a continual welded bead is used in the entire perimeter of the joined section. In order to do so, OK 46 electrodes (3.25 mm) are used. A pre-stressed strip locking system was developed by the company, ensuring that all rings to be concreted together with the piles, stay in position relative to the head, thus avoiding any problem in executing the joints during the drives.

Technical characteristics of the piles

PILE

Full
Area
(cm²)

Concrete
Area
(cm²)

Perimeter
(cm)

Central
Hole
(cm)

Wall
Thickness
(cm)

Mass
(Kg / m)

Admissible
Compression
(Nk) (tf)

Silo with a capacity of up to 75 tons of cement per hour.

Double-Sequential Loading System:

a) in cement mixing trucks

b) in planetary mixers

Power of 200 V and 380 V or a generator with a capacity of 300 kVA.

The dynamic monitoring of piles is performed by using a basic set of instruments and equipment in order to gather and treat the data. The gathering of records generated during the application of the axial dynamic loading is performed by means of prior fixation, in a section near the top of the pile, with the aid of special bushings, of a pair of specific deformation transducers and a pair of accelerometers, in a diametrically opposed position, so that there is the compensation of eventual flexion and eccentric effects, during the striking of the hammer.

The deformation gauges are constituted of four 350-ohm film "strain-gages", assembled in a complete Wheatstone bridge arrangement in order to amplify the resistance variation effect proportional to the pile deformation, placed at the tension concentration points of the aluminum frames. The sensitivity is between 350 ME/mV/V and 450 ME/mV/V.

The accelerometers used are piezoelectric with incorporated amplifier in order to reduce problems with noise. Linear up to at least 5,000g and 10,000Hz. The accelerometer is assembled onto a specially designed and patented block, which provides electronic insulation and a practically rigid base, which has internal mechanical absorption, strictly necessary to eliminate frequencies over 2,000Hz, which might cause resonance.
The accelerometer's sensitivity is of approximately 1 mV/g (1,000g/V).

The strain-gauges, as well as the accelerometers, are reusable due to the fact that they are fixated with screws and anchor bolts to the pile shaft. The signals thus obtained (raw data) are transferred by means of a system of connection cables to an electronic device that transcodes and processes them through a series of calculations (online), during each hammer strike. This compact and robust device especially designed to be used in the field is called a PDA (Pile Driving Analyzer).

The PDA provides the conditioning of the signals from the specific deformation transducers and the accelerometers, converting the signals measured in force and speed, multiplied by the average impedances, respectively, to be used in a digital microcomputer. This processor uses the wave propagation theory in order to calculate data , such as:

Activated soil resistance;

Maximum tensions on the pile;

Pile integrity;

Hammer performance.

The GC model has an attached oscilloscope, which allows the visualization of the force and speed signals multiplied by the impedance that is being recorded; a magnetic tape recorded for storage and later signal analysis, and a mini-printer that prints out certain parameters such as, maximum impact force, maximum strike energy, driving system efficiency, etc. Such parameters can be selected during the driving.

We provide your project with a Mobile Center for a fully automatic production of concrete, which reduces costs, improves quality and creates greater precision of the process.

Benefits

Alternative for truck circulation restricted areas.

Avoid construction bottlenecks because of lack of concrete.

Provides precision in trace control.

Reduction in construction time.

Cost reduction.

Reduction of cement consumption with the use of the planetary mixer.

Silo with a capacity of up to 75 tons of cement/hour.

Double Sequential Loading System:

a) in concrete mixing trucks

b) in the planetary mixer

Permits the use of up to 4 different aggregates.

Electric power of 200 V and 380 V or generator with 300 kVA of capacity.