What is a screw pile?
Screw pile – an element of the foundation of the pile screw, it is a hollow metal pipe with a screw tip (this constructive feature lets to screw piles into the ground). Sometimes they are called Screw piles are sometimes referred to as screw piers, screw anchors, helical piles, helical piers, or steel screw-in piling. This foundation has much lower labor and time costs for its construction than other types of foundations.
The pile reaches the specified depth and tightly hold in it, thus it becomes a reliable basis for the future construction.
What kinds of screw piles exist?
There are many kinds of screw piles, but we’ll look at three basic ones.
Screw piles used in individual construction. All screw piles can be divided into several types depending on the manufacturing technology of screw tips:
- welded multi-turn helix
- welded single-turn helix
- molded tip
Welded single-turn helix piles. The welded screw blade of this pile is a conventional steel plate, the plate is welded to the pipe by welding. This technology is very popular for its low cost.
Welded multi-turn helix piles. The tips of such piles is like the self-tapping screw. Most often, the pile stem has the shape of a cone, sometimes a cylinder. A large number of spiral blades cover the pile stem, these blades achieve the high load-bearing capacity and additional resistance to side loads. This design requires less effort to screw the pile in the ground. This type of screw piles are good for regions with frequent cycles of freezing and thawing of soils, earthquakes, etc. Multi-turn blades keep load perfectly, but they are not able to handle negative load (pulling), so you can get negatively affect to the foundation system and it can lead to damage to the installed construction on it. Therefore, it is recommended to use wide blade piles in seismic regions and in frost swelling soils.
Screw piles with molded tip. These piles are made in the foundry by precision casting. The detail is quite complex and the price of a pile with such a tip will be much higher than the pile with a welded tip, but the quality of the screw pile with a molded tip exceeds the pile with a welded blade in all respects. The precise geometric surface of the screw part provides the stability and the smoothness of an installation.
Use Torsion equipment for installation of screw piles: Manual ground screw driver or Self-Propelled ground screw machine.