Steel Sheet Pile
Technical Guides
The PDCA Steel Sheet Pile Committee recently released three revised and
updated technical guides for steel sheet piles. Available now!
By Gerry McShane, Chair, PDCA Steel Sheet Pile Committee Detail from the cover of PDCA Sheet Piling Installation Guide
In 2004, the North American Steel Sheet Piling Association
(NASSPA) was formed by four manufacturers of hot rolled
steel sheet piling. These included the domestic mills Nucor
Yamato and Gerdau Ameristeel along with the import producers
Hoesch Spundwand und Profil and ArcelorMittal. The four manufacturers
set about funding the development of a number of educational
topics and over the next few years produced a number of
technical guides, PowerPoint presentation modules, white papers
and specifications.
With much of its work complete, NASSPA was dissolved in 2010.
All promotion of the technical publications ended, and they were
no longer available to the marketplace.
In 2018, the PDCA Board of Directors decided it was time to
form a Steel Sheet Pile Committee to fill a need in the market for
coordinated education and promotion of steel sheet piling as no
other entity was doing this. A committee was formed and was open
to anyone with an interest in developing the market understanding
and use of steel sheet piling. Over the coming weeks, participants
from steel manufacturers and suppliers, contractors, engineers
and equipment suppliers joined the committee.
The committee set about reviewing the archived publications
of NASSPA and quickly determined that three significant publications
should be considered for updating and re-publishing.
These included:
1. Steel Sheet Piling Guidance on Corrosion
2. NASSPA Best Practices Sheet Piling Installation Guide
3. Steel Sheet Piling Retaining Wall Cost Comparison
Technical Report
These three publications were chosen because they represent
three fundamental questions on the use of sheet piling that are
continually being asked: “What does sheet piling cost compared to
concrete alternatives?”; “What are the best methods to install sheet
piling?”; and, “How will steel sheet piling stand up to corrosion?”
The committee decided that it would be best to form three
sub-committees, each tasked with going through each document,
identifying what needed to be changed or updated, provide the
changes needed and pull that information together for final editing
and eventual printing.
STEEL SHEET PILE TECHNICAL GUIDES
One exception was the Retaining Wall Cost Comparison technical
report. This had been developed by an outside consultant and
given its considerable technical content and size of the document,
it was deemed necessary to seek PDCA funding for the updating.
Further, on evaluation by the board it was decided to completely
re-do the comparison to better focus steel sheet piling against
its primary concrete alternatives, secant walls and tangent walls.
The committee was very fortunate to have Richard Hartman of
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