A rugged marine impact penetrometer for sea floor assessment

The utilization of marine sediments, as well as the awareness of hazards originating from unstable sea floor conditions, has increased since the second half of the last century. Accordingly, in situ tests have been developed to assess the geotechnical properties of marine sediments, with dynamic impact penetration testing being one of them. Thereby, CPT instrumentation or alternate sensors are used within the impact penetrometers. The aim of the research in this thesis is to investigate the applicability of an impact penetrometer (LIRmeter) for assessing geotechnical properties of marine sediments by sole measurement of acceleration. During a verification study, it was shown that dynamically acquired cone resistance data was interchangeable with data from the acceleration sensors. Further investigation by conducting laboratory tests on dense sands with low amounts of cohesive fines showed a good correlation between reference data from geotechnical tests and dynamically acquired data.