Concrete wall panel flatness & plumbness

Brad,

It's funny that you should mention this type of project. I have been contacted about a similar type project for steel columns.

I would shoot the face of the building reflectorless and inverse the coordinates at the base of the wall and at the top of the wall, and compare the horizontal positions.

I am sure there are other methods that might be employed. I am beginning my research on the best way to accomplish this.

Brad,

It sounds like you're describing what we use to call pre-cast "tilt-up" wall panels. It has been a number of years, but I've been involved in several projects of that type.

The first thing that comes to mind is I've never seen a precast panel that had much play when it came to installation. The panels I am familiar with were shop cast (off site) and trucked to the job. They were cast with weld plates flush on the surfaces. Most of the weld plates were on the back of the panel and would not show from the outside. The building frame's substructure they were being welded to was the key to their position. The iron workers had plumb-bobs (and I mean PLUMB BOBS) they used for their final positioning. The survey work I was involved with was usually the first panel at a corner and we would 'plumb' the corner with an instrument from two locations, 90 degrees to each other. All the other panels along that wall were just parallel to the first and plumbed with their 5 pound brass.

If you are talking about the integrity of the panel itself (square and uniform thickness), you are on your own. I do know that most of the panels I dealt with had a lot of slop in the thickness, usually +/- 1/2" in a 9 or 10 inch thick panel.

Tilt wall construction. I don't think I've ever seen them 40' tall, at forty feet that almost sounds like a permit load and they would be hauling 150 on site, that sounds expensive. Maybe formed and poured on site and they need you to check the initial dimensions of the form before the pour..?

If they were relatively narrow, say 8-10 feet then they would fit nicely on a standard 40 or 44 foot flatdeck trailer.

Most of the ones I've seen locally are cast in place on the floor slab after it's finished. You drive past the site for weeks, seems like nothing is going on then all of a sudden the walls are all standing up and they are starting on the roof structure.

Someone asked if such a thing could be done in Field Genius.
I'm assuming you need to verify this and provide some convincing evidence. Report.
I'd wondered if you plastered your wall with as many shots as thought necessary then via the computer lay it flat and contour it at minute intervals.
You could also make a' base plane', 4 corners?, then make a surface of that, compare it to the surface of the wall, subtract one from another which produces a surface from which you can create another set of contours giving the deviations from the flat plane adopted as the true vertical wall except it's now laying flat.
Obviously need to set your contour interval and modelling settings to accept the very small intervals and depths involved.
If you're still with me, that would be a way I'd have a crack at this. Be interested to hear others.

My Nikon has software that does similar,. Read 4 points and it creates a plane, then in effect stake the plane and report same.
As TDS wrote the software I imagine other programs by them has same.
Not sure if that routine is still in the post Trimble ones?

"If they were relatively narrow, say 8-10 feet then they would fit nicely on a standard 40 or 44 foot flatdeck trailer."

You're right, thanks Steve. I had forgotten seeing them stacked in an "A" frame on a flatbed.
Etched into my mind was a time I followed one such flatbed using the direct connector between IH-610 and I-10. Resting on the edge of the flatbed was a cardboard box containing twenty or thirty 1" or 1-1/2" fastening nuts. Centrifugal force, as he made the bend at 50 or 60 mph, turned the cardboard box over and these nuts hitting the concrete at that speed took off like ping pong balls and it was a mess.

Jimmy has the right idea.

Plumbness can also be assessed in the other direction by sighting the top of the column or wall edge with the crosshairs and then tiling the scope down. Have someone at the bottom with a stick tape pressed up against the column so you can read the offset. That will give the differential between top and bottom.

Then using reflectorless capability shoot the center of the other face (the part of the column or wall facing toward the instrument)at the top and bottom. That will provide the differential in that direction. Using this combined method should be able to reduce the number of setups by 1/2.

All that being said, I have done this for column lines, but never for walls, but I imagine it's can work the same way. I'm not sure about the 'flatness' thought....

I am trying to get my head around the spatial orientation but couldn't you shoot a bunch of reflector less points on each wall and run small interval contours? I think you could just swap the x and z axis in excel as long as you do treat every wall seperate and rotate the coordinates so that the top or bottom of the wall runs perpendicular to the z axis being used as the x in my head this makes sense but I don't know how it will work in practice. I know in survey pro you can use any robot as an ersatz scanner by defining a box and interval so I would use the Cl of each pannel and make the interval width x width then repeat 1' in from each edge. So it would de 3 fake scans from the same setup. It would probably take some time but if you enter your perimeters into survey pro it will give you a time estimate.

Leica has a program called reference plane, ideal for such an application. I think it's only a couple hundred bucks.

Concrete wall panel plumbness - UPDATE

We only had to verify the "plumbness" of each panel. They were already installed on the building. We ran a tight traverse around the building. We rented a reflectorless and located about 1200 points with a lot of over overlapping shots to verify consistency. Once we got locked onto the existing steel grid with a best fit, then we were able to produce a report like this: