Geotechnical information

GeoLab is only as useful as the site information it is given. The workspace is designed to consume geotechnical parameters rather than to invent a soil profile.

Soil conditions

Capacity, installation, and lateral behavior depend on the soil profile: strength, density, layering, and whether the profile is cohesive, granular, or mixed. Report extraction and structured inputs exist to pull those facts into the project. They still require engineering review of the source report.

Groundwater

Groundwater depth affects driving, corrosion, buoyancy, and construction method. If groundwater depth is not established, GeoLab’s orchestrator rules cap confidence rather than pretending the unknown depth is a known number.

Frost

Frost depth and adfreeze affect required embedment and uplift resistance in cold climates. Frost handling is part of the geotechnical ruleset. It is not a reason to ignore local code and a project geotechnical engineer.

Bedrock

Bedrock depth changes everything: refusal risk for driven piles and ground screws, socketing questions for some systems, and whether a ballasted or shallow system is even in play. Unknown bedrock is treated as a data gap with a confidence penalty, not as “assume deep soil.”

Other parameters

Depending on the analysis, GeoLab also considers loads, corrosion context, and regional design-code routing (for example ASCE or NBCC as selected by region). Always confirm the code basis used for the project.

Honesty about missing data

Missing critical depths should make results more conservative in presentation — lower confidence, explicit penalties — not more confident because the software still produced a chart.