The 20RF vibratory hammer was designed to work in urban areas close to existing structures without impacting them.

The Shanghai Greenland Group selected a stretch of the Jiamin elevated highway for a trial with this resonance free vibratory hammer. The demonstration site was chosen for its representative Shanghai soil conditions (backfill soil silty clay sand clay sandy silt and then a layer of silty clay) and the proximity to hotels and office heavy traffic within meters of the site and a network of pipelines running crisscross in the immediate vicinity.

The trial was designed to prove the suitability of the resonance free piling method in inner city construction projects. The successful demonstration opens the door to applying this construction method in areas that were up to now off-limits for vibratory hammers because of vibration disturbance and were therefore subjected to building methods which had other environmental impact such as pollution from bentonite slurry handling and the nuisance and noise of prolonged presence of equipment blocking the surroundings of the construction site. 

The ICE 20RF was selected for the demonstration from Shanghai ICE’s rental fleet. A 24 meter long casing and a 24 meter long H beam were chosen by the client for the demonstration of the driving and extracting capability of the hammer and to validate the claim made by the ICE sales team that no large amounts of soil are pulled up during the extraction of the casing pile. A large crowd had assembled for the day and everyone was duly impressed by the hammer’s performance: no vibrations were felt (nor measured by the Vibra+ vibration monitor). After lunch the H beam and casing were extracted. As expected the extracted H-beam left no marks. The 24m long 800mm diameter casing was also extracted in about 20 minutes without bringing up any soil; on the contrary the casing had compacted the soil and left an indent which was later filled up with soil. The trial proved that resonance free vibratory hammers are suitable for the driving and extracting of casings and opens the way for the wide use of sheet pile and combi-walls for temporary excavation works in inner city construction projects. Please visit our website to watch the video of this demonstration.

ICE RF hammers truly operate at high frequency (> 2000 RPM) and are equipped with a variable moment mechanism that ensures there are no vibrations during the start-up and shut down of the machine. Contact an ICE representative to learn how you can implement this technology in your next project.