Basement walls are traditionally built with reinforced concrete in Canada. However, concrete may not perform adequately in the long term and concrete has a huge carbon footprint – more than 8% of global man-made CO2 emission comes from the cement industry. The research project is aimed at timber panel walls, a sustainable material, to replace traditional concrete in the basement construction. The research will primarily be carried out on an existing large-scale experimental timber basement wall on the university campus.

In Canada, screw piles are widely used in supporting residential and commercial buildings. While the design of screw piles are general well-known to engineers, the uplift displacement of screw piles during the winter season is still mysterious, especially in cases where screw piles are installed in frost-susceptible soils. The present project is intended to conduct a field test of screw piles in the clay of Alberta and therefore to provide a case study for the engineering performance of screw piles in cold regions.

Helical piles are extensively used across Canada in various engineering applications. Current design methods estimate the axial capacity of helical piles using soil strength parameters when site investigation is available. Alternatively, helical piles can be designed from an empirical torque correlation when installation torques are available. However, it will be more valuable to the industry to have direct design approaches based on geotechnical site investigation.