Personnel assigned to the quality control (QC) division of the operations department are responsible for ensuring that construction work is according to the job specifications; that is, the workmanship, materials used, prevailing conditions, and appearance of the finished structure are within the specified minimum standards. This involves constant and careful construction inspection and materials testing. While QC is capable of performing inspections, it needs support from the materials testing section of the engineering division to perform testing, such as in-place density and concrete strength determinations.

As the EA supervisor, a large portion of your job is making sure that QC is receiving the support that it needs. This includes, in part, coordinating testing requirements to ensure that all tests are completed on time, making sure that tests are performed using established standard procedures, analyzing test results for accuracy and validity, and advising QC of the testing results. In addition to providing support to QC, the materials testing section also performs tests, such as soil classification and compaction testing, that may be needed for the design of a new structure, road, or airfield, or the various tests that are associated with the design or proportioning of concrete or asphalt-concrete mixtures. Obviously, to do all of this testing, you must make sure that your EAs are properly trained. If you have been away from a construction battalion for some time, you may even find it necessary to do some refresher training yourself.

As with the drafting and surveying section, requests for materials testing can be made using the engineering division work request (fig. 14-1). These can then be posted to a work schedule and handled using a priority-system method like that described previously.

Not all of the work requests, however, will be originated by a project supervisor or the QC division. Many of them should start with you. For this to happen, you must become thoroughly familiar with each of the projects the battalion is tasked with. This involves reviewing the project plans and specifications to see what tests are needed and reviewing all project schedules to know when the tests are required. Having done this, you can generate the work requests and post work to the schedule with tentative start dates that can be adjusted as changes occur. Obviously, you must coordinate closely with the project supervisors and QC to know when changes are needed.

You need to remember, too, that some tests are dependent upon other tests; for example, the results of in-place density testing using the nuclear moisture-density meter must be compared with the results of laboratory tests performed on the same material. For these pretests, you will not receive a work request; you must initiate them yourself. Never wait until the last minute to have these tests performed or you maybe the cause of unnecessary construction delay.

All materials tests have a specific purpose, and when carefully performed according to established standard procedures should provide results that can be reasonably expected. As a supervisor, you need to know what the end purpose is before you can decide what tests to perform and you need to know what to expect from the tests. With this knowledge, you are in a position that enables you to analyze the results of each test performed. When a test results in data that is greatly out of step with that expected, then you need to determine the cause; for example, if an in-place density test shows unexpectedly high results, what happened? Was the test performed improperly? Was a substance, such as cement, added to the soil that greatly increased the density of the in-place material as compared to previously performed laboratory tests? These things can, and do, sometimes happen.

In addition to analyzing the test results for accuracy and validity, you sometimes need to place the test data into a more usable form. Figure 14-6, for example, shows California bearing ratio data that is presented in a usable form. You can read about this in Materials Testing, NAVFAC MO-330.

Lower rated personnel assigned as materials testers should be given assignments for spare-time reading of printed sources on testing procedures. Locally used data forms should be explained. New personnel should be assigned to learning on-the-job procedures in the laboratory and at the jobsite under experienced personnel. The purpose of what is being done should always be explained; for example, the ultimate effect of soil tests on the work of highway subgrading should be clearly shown. Some testing, such as fieldtests for soils, require extensive practice to become proficient. Even though field testing is a requirement at the senior EA level, you should see to it that the junior rated EAs get a chance to practice it as often as possible under the watchful eye of an experienced technician.

There is relatively little routine, day-to-day work in testing since the work of the materials testing

Figure 14-6.Resentation of CBR data.

section is keyed to the construction currently being done. The person making soils tests in the laboratory today may be performing slump tests on the jobsite tomorrow. The testing section is usually small; and therefore, each person in the section must be trained to cope with all testing problems. In short, one of your main responsibilities as a supervisor is to train your people.