DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE OF A PORTABLE PIEZOCONE DRIVER FOR HIGH-RESOLUTION PROFILING OF WETLAND SEDIMENTS

A portable piezocone driver was designed and built for use on wetland deposits that cannot support the weight of conventional track-mounted equipment. The driver has successfully pushed a standard piezocone to the bottom of a wetland deposit at depths ranging from 2 to 8 m, inclu ding thick sand lenses. Records of penetration pore pressure and point resistance from these explorations distinguish several different type s of peat, an underlying organic deposit, and sand strata. These resul ts demonstrate that a piezocone can be driven through thick wetland de posits without a truck-mounted rig and that the data collected can be used to map deposit-scale heterogeneities in the wetland soil type.