A Simple Hand-held Recording Penetrometer

The paper describes a newly developed solid state recording penetrometer for soil studies. Force is measured by a straingauge load cell and depth by a reliable electronic system. The force data are digitized and stored in a simple data logger provided with the instrument. Data for up to 85 penetrations to 0.3 m depth could be stored and retrieved. The penetrometer has been evaluated in a soil bin experiment against a conventional non-recording penetrometer. The statistical results indicate that the instrument is comparably precise in performance with the field proven non-recording penetrometer.