Testing Facilities

Laboratory Equipment

The laboratory is equipped with completely new equipment imported from UK and India. Almost 90% of the testing equipment imported have been manufactured by ELE International, UK and the rest by AIMIL, India. Testing facilities include various tests to be conducted on soils, cement, aggregates, fresh and hardened concrete, asphalt and asphalt concrete and field investigations and exploratory borings as described in the following paragraph. The list of tests that can be performed is given in Annex I.

Special facilities include the following also

• Concrete Mix Design: Tests on various ingredients of concrete, conducting trial mixes on various proportions at different w/c ratios in order to determine the optimum proportions of cement, aggregate, water and admixture to meet the requirements or specified minimum criteria of specific jobs.
• Job Mix Formula of Asphalt Concrete: Tests on various ingredients of asphalt concrete and Marshall and Flow tests on different asphalt concrete mixes to determine the job mix formula.
• Tests and advice on single and double bituminous surface dressing/treatments.

Static Cone Penetration Tests and Design of Pile Foundation System:

Due to the sky-rocketing prices of land in Kathmandu Valley, vertical extension is the order of the day. Not surprisingly, many high rise buildings, commercial complexes and residential apartments, are emerging in Kathmandu Valley. Due to generally low bearing capacity and susceptibility to settlement in most areas of Kathmandu and also due to liquefaction potential in some soil strata due to sudden shocks as in the case of earthquakes, deep foundations like piles becomes inevitable in case of buildings higher than 6~7 stories. With this situation in mind, Akara Materials Testing Laboratory (P) Ltd. also introduces Static Cone Penetration Test, generally known as SCPT test or Dutch Cone Penetration Test.

The SCPT test was first developed in Holland for investigation into subsoil strata of fine sand, silty fine sand, clay deposits and the marine sediments. Due to its simplicity and very accurate measurement of cone bearing resistance and skin friction, it is widely used in many countries. A specially designed probe unit consisting of a hard steel cone and a sleeve is pushed hydraulically into the soil strata in question and cone resistance and side or skin friction values are obtained directly at every 20cm intervals up to large depths.

The cone resistance thus recorded can be related directly to un-drained shear strength, since the test is so rapid un-drained conditions are developed. This test is particularly suitable to Kathmandu Valley and Terai regions of Nepal, where the underlying strata generally are very similar. The data obtained from this test is very useful for foundation design analysis particularly design of pre-cast, bored cast in-situ or steel tubular piles.

Other Services:

• Site investigations for material source identification.
• Laboratory Personnel training.
• Field investigations and Field tests.
• Load Tests (on piles) and Bearing Capacity Tests (on soils).
• Installation and or technical services with respect to pile foundations.