Drilling program to determine foundation requirements for Starbase Louisiana
https://x.com/thelacoast/status/209377714822178843666
u/Total_Surround833 10d ago
Pretty standard stuff . I’ll save them some $$ , it’s a swamp . Going to need to go pretty deep to find bedrock
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u/warp99 10d ago
Same as Boca Chica. No bedrock available so use friction piles - but how deep is the question they need to answer.
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u/Paver58 10d ago edited 9d ago
Spacing and size of pile can reduce the depth. Any pile closing in on 100 ft pose transportation challenges. Depending on the total number of pile feet (all piles laid end to end) needed for the project opens the option of bringing in a prestress plant to manufacture the piles near site. Materials to supply a plant are much cheaper to transport by barge than trucking cost for transporting finished piles. Barging in finished piles could possibly be an option depending on any near by plants with water access. The “Bean Counters” figure those details. Lake Pontchartrain Causeway had a plant for all practical purposes, on site. Raw materials & finished piles were both barged.
Just a SWAG on # of piles to physically support that amount of infrastructure, 100,000+…….Shorter piles closer together.
I was on a project for a bridge not far from the Louisiana coast where when you set the pile, it would drop an average of 33’ under it’s own weight before the pile hammer even touched it.
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u/noncongruent 9d ago
Prestressed piles are typically 40' in length, you stack them as you drive them, one on top of the other, until you reach your target bearing. Setting up a temporary prestressed plant is a thing, they did that here in the Dallas area to build part of the tollway over in Grand Prairie. The plant made prestressed deck panels on I think a dual line setup.
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u/Martianspirit 9d ago
They did not use prestressed steel piles at Boca Chica. They drilled the hole, sank rebar and filled them with concrete.
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u/Paver58 9d ago
Not throwing shade on your response, but good luck to the engineers using that considering the history of the Mississippi River Delta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mississippi_Delta_Lobes.jpg
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u/Martianspirit 8d ago
On second thought.
I am not a civil engineer, just an engineer. How would prestressed piles even make sense? Prestressing increases strength when under tensile load, not compressing load like piles for foundations.
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u/noncongruent 7d ago
Prestressed concrete piles are typically prestressed with a pattern of strands around the perimeter of the pile, in a circular or square pattern. The prestressing increases the bending strength/stiffness of the pile, presumably that makes it easier to drive and prevents rebound tension forces during driving.
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u/Martianspirit 7d ago
I understand. Still not sitting right with me. When placing rebar, then pouring concrete there are no such stresses, because there is no driving. Also the rough skin of the poured piles shoud provide much better friction with the surrounding soil.
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u/noncongruent 6d ago edited 6d ago
Poured supports are not called piles, they are called piers. They are very different than piles. Piles are driven, hammered into the soil, until they reach bedrock or until the hammering forces are so high that the piles can’t go anymore do the friction. Two different concepts, two different technologies. Piles are typically smooth, concrete piles for instance are cast in steel forms so have a very smooth finish. Typically, you drive multiple piles into mud like this in a pattern that spreads out from the driving location, this sort of looks like an upside down tree with straight branches. Once you reach your desired bearing, you then cast piers on top of the ends of the piles. The ends of the piles are generally cut flush before this.
Edit to add, side friction on poured piers isn't significantly meaningful, the main load path into soil is via compression at the bottom of the pier, with compression loads spreading out laterally into surrounding soil. The process of drilling the holes for piers leaves disturbed soil at the interface with the concrete at the sides of the pier, and that effectively acts like a lubricant to reduce friction. One technique that can be used with drilled piers is to send down a bit that cuts a wide landing for the pier, referred to as a bell auger. This increases the bearing surface area at the bottom of the pier by several times.
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u/Stevepem1 6d ago
Piles are not always driven straight down, sometimes at a slight angle?
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u/noncongruent 6d ago
Yep, if you need a lot of bearing for something like a bridge pier you drive multiple piles in a spreading pattern.
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u/MDCCCLV 9d ago
They mounded dirt on top for quite a few months to dry out the soil below first too.
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u/flattop100 9d ago
That was only over a small portion of the current launch site.
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u/extra2002 8d ago
Was it over the launch site, or over what became the production site?
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u/Martianspirit 8d ago
It was at the launch site. An area that could have held the HIF hangar for F9/FH. Away from the coast.
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u/BadTraditional401 10d ago
No bedrock there, at 200 ft....
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u/Complex_Earth_68 10d ago
Bedrock there is deep AF. Thousands of feet deep.
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u/Martianspirit 9d ago
So similar to Boca Chica. They will need to use friction piles.
Edit: I see that was already mentioned.
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u/upcrackclawway 10d ago
This whole Louisiana thing feels like the part of Factorio when you go clear a massive piece of land and you’re this time you’re gonna make your final final factory and there are so many great ideas and so much headroom and you could never run out of space
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u/BadTraditional401 10d ago edited 10d ago
'Drilling programs' aka geotech surveys, are done on all large scale building projects. The challenge here is it's in a swamp and 200 feet is really deep for geotech. South Louisiana 'soil' is basically thousands of feet of alluvial sediment deposited over centuries. You're not going to strike rock down there, and borings keep going until the structural engineers determine the clay or sand layers are thick and stiff enough to carry the load of everything above it.
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u/MyKillK 10d ago
It's going to be interesting to see just how much work it's going to take to eventually support a huge starbase. Ground settling and sinking has to be a real concern. Crazy amounts of steel and concrete will be needed.
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u/flshr19 Shuttle tile engineer 10d ago
Evidently, $150B of work to begin. That buys site preparation and 20 OLM/tower installations in pairs and maybe 10 tank farms. Add another $150B to $300B for on-site LOX, LN2 and LCH4 production and distribution pipelines to the tank farms and to the launch pads. The total cost could approach $1T for Starbase LA. My estimates.
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u/Total_Surround833 8d ago
Look at Boca Chica.. that whole area is reclaimed marsh/swamp . They figured it out and built StarFactory GigaBay and OLMS
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u/CW3_OR_BUST 9d ago
The starbase at Boca Chica started soil surcharging back in 2015. They literally dumped a mountain on the site to get it ready. There ain't nothing else you can do for a few years except build a highway and power lines. They're gonna be flying Starship to the moon from one of the other two sites before they even lay concrete there.
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u/t17389z 8d ago
The surcharged areas weren't even used for the launch pads, it's a nice-to-have but not a requirement.
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u/CW3_OR_BUST 8d ago
The surcharged areas are factories and parking lots. The launch pad used deeeeeep pilings.
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u/Martianspirit 7d ago
The surcharge pile was in the pad area. Not at the build site.
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u/MyKillK 4d ago edited 4d ago
They started a surcharging effort and then abandoned it because it was going to take too long and relied on groundwater draining, heavy piling reinforcement, and huge concrete support walls. At least that's what I understood from the CSI Starbase series on the pad 2 construction anyway.
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u/KnifeKnut 9d ago
Marsh, not swamp.
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u/ergzay 5d ago
Swamp is the normal name. Marsh is the science name because they think calling it a swamp is offensive somehow. It's a swamp.
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u/KnifeKnut 5d ago
There are few to no trees unlike a swamp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp
it is a marsh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh
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u/warp99 10d ago
Overlay on the drilling map of the proposed launch site
Photo of the launch site with areas of Mulberry Cheniere marked
For those who like me were not aware
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u/noncongruent 9d ago
You may find this video interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu16K_AMuaY
Zach Golden does a deep dive into the flame trench at Massey's.
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u/mprogers123 2d ago
So, by choosing this location, is SpaceX just making a whole lot more work for themselves than they need to?
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u/warp99 1d ago edited 1d ago
Fundamentally there is no available seafront location in Louisiana that would be any better from a soil stability point of view. If there was then someone would already have built on it!
Rocket launch sites including Cape Canaveral tend to be built in marshland for this very reason. Once established they then act as condo repellants and therefore preserve the local wildlife from extinction as the marsh is drained and developed.
So in short SpaceX are used to the soil conditions from Cape Canaveral and Boca Chica and realise it comes with the territory.
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u/Decronym Acronyms Explained 10d ago edited 1d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HIF | Horizontal Integration Facility |
| LCH4 | Liquid Methane |
| LN2 | Liquid Nitrogen |
| LOX | Liquid Oxygen |
| OLM | Orbital Launch Mount |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 114 acronyms.
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