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BUTTERLEY GEOTECHNICAL, CARMARTHENSHIRE (WALES), U.K.

A gINT Case Study

Butterley Geotechnical specialises in the areas of site investigation, ground investigation, geotechnical & geoenvironmental consulting, and soil and rock laboratory testing.

Since 1992, the company has used gINT on virtually all projects, including the Heathrow Terminal 4 Baggage handling conveyor, the Celtic Manor Hotel, the Shellhaven Oil Refinery, Afon Mwldan Flood Alleviation, and the Polperro Flood Alleviation Scheme. Most recently, Butterley has used gINT on the Eden Project in Cornwall, a site containing giant greenhouse domes for climate-controlled growing of tropical and sub-tropical plants.

At Butterley, gINT is used mainly for borehole and trial pit log creation, including window sampling, dynamic probe logs and results, shell and auger logs, and rotary logs. Butterley also uses gINT for a wide variety of additional purposes:

  • Falling/rising head test results
  • Graphs
  • Gas & water monitoring
  • Presentation of site
  • Core and trial pit photographs
  • Test results in graph or tabular format
  • Site cross sections (often used in conjunction with AutoCAD®/CorelDRAW®)

The company has also recently begun using gINT for a new purpose: lab testing results (both graph and tabular).

In the early days, before gINT Windows versions, the company had done all ground cross-sections and exploratory hole location plans by hand, and reports such as falling/rising head tests and monitoring results were done in Excel. The staff credits gINT software with dramatically streamlining production of these and other reports.

"gINT has to be one of the best bits of software I have ever used-and I use an awful lot of software," comments Miles Davis, Senior Engineering Assistant at Butterley Geotechnical. "Now virtually all our geotechnical data is stored, manipulated and presented from one piece of software, making life so much easier. gINT's technical support is the best in the software business bar none, making far larger companies efforts look amateurish in comparison."

Davis further comments that the program's new abilities to help users write custom calculation and error checking rules (through gINT Rules) has enabled Butterley to speed up data input and to bring its lab on board. Aside from graphics and drawings software, Davis says, gINT is now one of only two software packages Butterley uses to produce its reports.