Energy Geotechnics – Wuttke, Bauer & Sánchez (Eds)

© 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-1-138-03299-6

Lessons learned from mechanical monitoring of a thermoactive pile

J. Habert & M. El’Mejahed

Cerema, Lille, France

J.B. Bernard
Ecome, Paris, France

ABSTRACT: This paper deals with a one year-long monitoring a thermo-active pile under a two-storey resi-
dential building in Gonesse (France). To fulfil the heating demands of the building, flight auger piles have been
installed and equipped with PEHD pipes, allowing the circulation of a cold fluid, which could be heated by the
surrounding soil. To apprehend the pile’s behaviour, displacements sensors have been fixed to the reinforcement
cage and embedded in concrete, to enable an automatic monitoring of strains and temperatures. On the one
hand, it provides elements on strains, temperatures and stress along the pile and caused by real heating demands
and circulation of a cold fluid. On the other hand, it also gives access to phenomena relevant for all piles (both
thermoactive and standard ones) but currently neglected for the design of structures : significant evolutions of
strains and stress in piles caused by the daily variations of outdoor temperature and sunshine can be underlined.
The analysis of the measurements hence allows to improve understanding the behaviour of thermoactive but also
standard piles.

1 INTRODUCTION to i) additional displacements, ii) additional structural

1.1 A promising method
In order to reduce the consumption of fossil energy
sources and the energy bill for heating and cooling
demands of buildings, energy geostructures constitute
an interesting alternative. Integrating heat exchanger
elements into geotechnical structures, and especially
in piles needed to ensure the baring capacity of the
structure, leads to minimized drilling costs, especially
in comparison with additional vertical geothermal
probes.
This technology has been used for almost 30 years
in different countries in Europe : Keble College in
Oxford-UK on 2001 (Kefford & al., 2010), Dock Mid-
field Zurich Terminal Airport-Switzerland on 2003
(Pahud & al., 2007), thermoactive embedded walls of
metropolitan stations, (Brandl, 2006, Bardoneschi &
Bernard, 2014).
1.2 Thermo-Mechanical effects
However mechanical effects induce by temperature
variations shall be addressed. The injected fluid in
the pile, whose temperature comprised between 1◦ C
to 35◦ C, I) leads indeed to either contraction (when
a cold fluid is injected) or dilation (when a warm
fluid is injected) of the pile itself and the surrounding
soil, but also ii) potentially modifies the soil strength
and stiffness parameters due to thermo-mechanic
effects. These phenomena can in a second step lead
forces and iii) modified factors of geotechnical safety
(pile compressive or tensile capacity).
1.3 Current practice for thermoactive piles design
Eurocodes and especially Eurocode 7 (EN 1997-1:
2004) don’t address especially thermoactive geostruc-
tures. Consequently there is currently neither design
standards nor even design method for thermo-active
piles. To ensure safety of such structures, contractors
have been constructing the buildings on thermoactive
piles with empirical consideration or with conservative
design by increasing the safety factor for geotechnical
resistance (Boënnec, 2009, Knellwolf et al., 2011).
However mechanical design of thermoactive piles
appears clearly as a two steps problem : on the first
step (but most important step of the process thermoac-
tive piles behaviour has to be reproduced. It involved
to understand the behaviour of such piles, bases on a
wide range of tests, including in situ tests, physical
modelling and long term monitoring : the present arti-
cle deals with a one year-long monitoring thermoactive
piles under a building.
2 MONITORED BUILDING DESCRIPTION
Piles of a two storey residential building located
in Gonesse (France) have been monitored. Figure 1
shows an overview of the building.

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Figure 1. Overview of the monitored building, on the right Figure 2. Vibrating wire gauge fixed on reinforcing cage.
side of the picture (source Google Earth).

2.1 Building description and energy demands

41 flats have been build, with a global area of 2995 m2 .
The overall building presents a peak heating demand
of 49 kW, combined with a global heating demand of
10.5 MWh/year.

2.2 Soil conditions and foundation system

The building is located on alluvial modern deposits
with poor mechanical properties on the first 7
to 9 meters, covering sandy layers (Sables de
Beauchamps). To ensure its bearing capacity, pile
foundations have been chosen.
The average SLS load on each pile is 250 kN. Con-
tinuous flight auger piles have been installed, with a
12,00 m length and a diameter comprised between 500 Figure 3. Location of monitored piles and strain gauges in
each pile.
and 600 mm.

2.3 Thermoactive piles energetic design

Crossing energy demands of the supported buildings
and the length of the piles, it has been chosen to only
fulfil the heating demands of the building.
In the present case, after estimating thermal proper-
ties of the surrounding soils, 63 geothermal piles (out
of 80 available piles) have been equipped, each with
two U-shaped geothermal pipes.
2.4 Monitoring of piles
Two piles have been monitored : a first thermoac-
tive 600 mm in diameter pile (P71) , located under
the building. A second standard (non thermoactive)
500 mm in diameter pile (P65) located under the edge
of the building.
To ensure the long term monitoring of piles, two
kind of sensors have been installed:
– strain sensors, consisting in vibrating-wire gauges,
to monitor the vertical strain. These sensors have
been fixed to the reinforced cages (as shown on Fig-
ure 2), before their embedding in the fresh concrete.
C-110 vibrating-wire gauges provided by Telemac
have been used,
– temperature sensors, consisting of continuous optic
fiber and thermocouples.
Due to construction process, it was finally not pos-
sible to have access to temperature datas. That’s why
only results of the vibrating wire gauges will be pre-
sented in this article. However, these gauges also allow
a measurement of the temperature. Figure 3 shows The
location of the seven gauges initially installed : it has
been tried to keep (before embedding in concrete) a
constant spacing between the strain sensors and the
U-loop PEHD pipes.
3 OBTAINED MEASUREMENTS
The building has been under construction from the
beginning of 2012 until middle of 2013. The first mea-
surements have been made in October 2014, a priori
just before the second heating cycle.
For different reasons it was note possible to have
access to measurement of strain of gauges 3 and
7. Measurements have been performed automatically
every 5 minutes since 22nd October 2014.

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Figure 4. Typical temperatures measurements.
Figure 5. Temperatures measurements in thermoactive pile.
3.1 Temperature measurements
Figures 4 and 5 show the characteristic evolving of
temperature both in thermoactive and standard piles.
For the thermoactive pile, the progressive decreas-
ing of temperature can be stated during winter. For
the standard pile, the first temperature sensor show
important temperature variations, due to his loca-
tion under the building’s edge. This sensor is indeed
affected by the outside temperature. On the contrary,
the deeper sensors do not show significant temperature
variations.
3.2 Strain measurements
Vertical strain in the pile can be studied through tak-
ing into account temperature effects and decomposing
the total vertical strain εv in an elastic part εel
v and at
thermal part εth
v , as quoted in Equation 1 (Laloui & al,
1999).
Through measuring the frequency F of vibrating-
wire gauges at time t, the vertical strain can be obtained
using Equation 2, taking into account temperature T .
where K is a gauge factor (for C110 vibrating wire
gauges, K = 1.875 10−9 Hz−2 ) and αT the thermal
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Figure 6. Characteristic evolving of vertical strains
(geothermal pile, z = 7 m).
Figure 7. Overall strain measurements.
expansion factor of the vibrating wire. As thermal
expansion factors of the vibrating wire gauges and the
pile materials (concretes and steel are very similar, the
vertical strain εel
v can easily and directly be obtained,
using Equation 3.
Figure 6 shows the characteristic evolving of these
different strains for the gauge V2 in thermoactive pile.
When a cold fluid is injected in a mechanically free
pile, the vertical strain would be equal to the thermal
strain εth
v and traduce contraction. Because of the sur-
rounding soil and supported structure, the (observed)
vertical shrinkage εv of the pile which is a limited part
of the thermal strain. This phenomena however leads
to additional tensile stresses in the pile, equal to Eεel
v
(where E is the Young modulus of the pile material).
During winter positive elastic vertical strain means
tensile stress.
Figure 7 shows the characteristic evolving of tem-
perature and strains for different sensors both in the
thermoactive pile (P71) and the standard pile (P65)
(each point is the average measurement during 4 days).
Figure 8 shows the same results on a shorter
period to ease the analysis (each point is the average
measurement during 1 day).
For the standard pile, since the temperature remains
quite constant, there is no strain caused by temperature
changes, and the elastic vertical strain is equal to the
vertical strain.
Figure 8. Strain measurements during the first winter. Figure 10. Correlation between outside temperature and
strains, pile P71, z = 7 m.

Figure 9. Influence of outside temperature, pile P71, Figure 11. Influence of time interval between consecutive
z = 7 m. measurements.

4 FURTHER ANALYSIS

4.1 Influence of outside temperature

Figure 9 shows the daily evolution of elastic verti-
cal strain during the 26th and 27th October 2014.
The correlation between the pile temperature and the
strains hence appears clearly. When the outside tem-
perature increase, the load on the geothermal pile P71
decreases. At the same time, the load on the Standard
pile decreases. Moreover the effect of the outside tem-
perature is more important for the shallow sensors than
for the deepest ones. It’s supposed that these results Figure 12. Strain variations in geothermal pile, z = 7 m.
are linked to the thermal expansion and contraction of
the building itself accompanying outside temperature Hence a 5 minutes interval (as chosen here) might
variations. appear quite small and at the same lead to a signifi-
To better analyse the phenomena, the Figure 10 cant load of datas. However, increasing this interval up
shows the correlation and the phase angle between to 2 hour will prevent to have access extreme values.
outside temperature and strains. Consequently the present study leads us to maintain at
Especially in summer, daily evolutions of tempera- least on measurement each hour.
ture can lead to additional strain up to 30 μdef. If the
short term modulus of deformation of concrete is con-
sidered, with an average value of 30000 MPa, a daily 4.3 Influence of geothermal fluid
variation of vertical stress in pile up to 90 kPa can also The evolving of the vertical strain is then compared to
be obtained. temperature changes in geothermal pile P71. In a first
step, measurements obtained for the thermoactive pile
at z = 7 m are plotted in Figure 12 (each point is the
4.2 Choosing the right time interval
average measurement during a 4 days period).
Figure 11 shows the influence of the chosen time inter- Strains hence appear to evolve quite linearly with
val between consecutive measurements during 27th temperature variations. The same analysis can finally
October 2014, for pile P71 at z = 7 m. be performed for each strain gauges, and also for

554
 Moreover, the measurement provides useful infor-
mation for standard piles located under buildings. The
importance of the variations of strains due to outside
temperature has indeed been stated. This phenomena
highlights the importance of automated measurements
to finely understand the behaviour of piles under
buildings.
The vertical strain monitoring is still functioning
and will allow in the future year to better understand
the behaviour of thermoactive pile systems.

Figure 13. Strain variations in the two monitored piles. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The work described in this paper forms part of a

Table 1. Ratio between temperature variations in pile 71 research project “GECKO” which is supported by
and strain. a grant from the French National Research Agency
(ANR). It is an industrial project with interna-
P71 P67 tional collaboration, involving companies and research
Pile laboratories in civil and energy engineering sec-
z (m) 0.5 7 11.8 6 11.8 tor: ECOME, BRGM, Cerema, IFSTTAR, LEMTA,
◦
LGCgE-Université Lille 1.
εel
v /T (μdef/ C) −9.1 −10.7 −7.3 4.5 2.8

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4.4 Conclusions
The present paper deals with a long term monitoring
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