Teretek® Preserves Foundations of Large Heritage Listed Building

The building’s foundation ground was strengthened using Teretek, an engineered resin injection solution that improves and consolidates weak soils and delivers exceptional ground strengthening.

In the design development phase, Mainmark worked in collaboration with the engineers on a concept solution detailing the injection pattern, depths and volumes of Teretek material to be placed.

Prior to undertaking the full scope of work, Mainmark conducted a Teretek trial on site to ensure the solution would achieve the required 200kPa ground strengthening. The trial was conducted in two strategic 2.5Lm areas, representing the whole site beneath the building’s foundations, with engineers closely reviewing DCP tests that were taken after each Teretek injection to check the strength of the treated soil and sub-surface soil layers.

After engineers confirmed the trials had been effective, Mainmark proceeded to inject Teretek around the building’s entire 250Lm perimeter footings, every 1m at depths of 3m, 2.5m and 2m. Due to the size of the solid brick footings, which measured 600mm in width, Mainmark injected Teretek to both sides of the footings to effectively address the ground weaknesses that were identified in the geotechnical report, improve the soil in the full footing width and avoid rotating the footing from a one-sided treatment.

Teretek is an advanced solution for ground improvement and re-levelling structures that, compared to other techniques, is cost effective, non-invasive and has no detrimental effects on the environment.

The Teretek injection process was completed in just 8 days with the client impressed with Teretek’s ability to deliver significant ground improvement for such a large heavy structure. This was achieved with very little impact on the surrounding pavements and building functionality during the works.

Upon completion, the site’s contractors engaged Mainmark to undertake further additional ground improvement works to support the building’s internal columns. The site’s contractors were also pleased with how a relatively small investment in the Teretek pre-works trial was able to give the engineering team greater confidence in the process and validation to proceed with a large-scale ground improvement project.