Products 
Geotechnical Sensors
Every geotechnical design is to some extent hypothetical, and every construction job involving earth or rock runs the risk of encountering surprises. These circumstances are the inevitable result of working with materials created by nature, often before the advent of human beings, by processes seldom resulting in uniform conditions. The inability of exploratory procedures to detect in advance all the possibly significant properties and conditions of natural materials requires the designer to make assumptions that may be at variance with reality and the constructor to choose equipment and construction procedures without full knowledge of what might be encountered.Field observetions, including quantitative measurements obtained by field instrumentation, provide the means by which the geotechnical engineer, in spite of these inherent limitationsm can design a project to be safe and efficient, and the constructor can execute the work with safety and economy. Thus, field instrumentation is vital to the practice of most geotechnics, in costrast to the practice of most other branches of engineering in which have greater control over the materials with which they deal.
GaiaComm supply, install and monitor geotechincal instrumentation from Europe's leading manufacturers of vibrating wire sensors which are used to measure strain, load, force, pressure and temperature and are universally recognised for their long-term stability within the harsh environmental often found in civil engineering construction sites. Applications include dam safety monitoring, tunnel and bridge monitoring, deep excavation and pile testing, slope stability and structural monitoring.
Additionally the company supplies products related in the ‘out of building’ part of geothermal (ground source heat) installation with a specialist range to enable contractors, particularly within the drilling industry, to take full advantage of this growing market.
A full range of products provided are the following:
Geotechnical Instrumentation
- Inclinometers - Inclination monitoring instruments incorporating cutting edge MEMS technology.
- Tilt Sensors- MEMS sensors for uniaxial or biaxial tilt measurement.
- Piezometers - For the measurement of pore water pressures in fully or partially saturated soil and rock.
- Settlement - For the measurement of settlement and heave in a range of applications.
- Extensometers - Locate and measure settlement, displacement and deformation in soil and rock.
- Load & Pressure - A range of cells for the measurement and control of compressive or tensile load and total or passive pressures.
- Strain Gauges - For the measurement of strain in concrete and steel.
- Readouts - A range of products which are used to accurately display data from Geosense instruments.
- DataLoggers - A range of products which are used to log data from Geosense instruments.
- Diver Data Loggers - A robust and compact datalogger for the automatic, accurate and reliable measuring and monitoring of groundwater levels.
- Software - Data and analysis software for use with a wide range of instrumentation.
- Environmental - Instrumentation products sold to environmental markets.
- Borehole Packers - Pneumatically or hydraulically inflatable packers that incorporate one fixed and one sliding head attached to a centre shaft.
- Carlson Instruments - CARLSON instruments are elastic wire strain meters containing two coils of highly elastic steel wire.
- Miscellaneous - Miscellaneous products and cabling.
Geothermal
- Geothermal Loops - Manufactured from polyethylene (PE100) for heat recovery through enclosed vertical or horizontal pipe systems.
- Manifolds & Chambers - Upstream and downstream recirculation liquid distributors are used for heat recovery through enclosed vertical or horizontal pipe systems.
- Thermal Grouts - A range of thermally enhanced grouts which protect groundwater from contamination, whilst providing maximum thermal conductivity to the geothermal loop
- Pressure Test Units - Used to test all the probes on site.
Pipe & Fittings - PE Pipe is available in coils of 25, 32 and 40mm diameters. Polyethylene fittings come in a range of sizes.
