Proposal and Validation of Standard Operating Procedure for Free-Fall Cone Penetration Test System

Recently, research and development on underwater cities have emerged. Hence, research equipment to investigate the characteristics of the seabed is also diversifying. Existing underwater ground survey equipment faces the problem where a large system, high cost, and available ships are limited. Therefore, the FFCPT (Free-Fall Cone Penetration Test) is emerging as a realistic alternative. KIOST in Korea is developing an FFCPT, intending to have a depth of 200m or more and a weight of less than 100kg. When operating the FFCPT, heavy-load work such as loading on a ship, moving, dropping, and extruding from the seabed is required. It is essential to perform work according to the standard operating procedure (SOP) in consideration of safety. However, there are no studies on SOPs for an FFCPT. Therefore, in this paper, an SOP for an FFCPT was proposed. The result of the total resistance test of the seabed demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed SOP. Furthermore, we could generalize our work using an FFCPT based on the proposed SOP. © ICROS 2022.