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UKIERI
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Concrete Congress - Innovations in Concrete Construction
ABSTRACT. Pile Foundation is common foundation system to support high rise buildings
to be constructed on soft clay or soil of low bearing capacity. In conventional methods, pile
are designed to bear or transfer whole superstructure load to soil and pile-cap (Raft) is
designed to transfer the superstructure loan to pile uniformly or for the up thrust of
underground water. It does not transfer any load directly to soil and hence require more
number of piles and proved to be uneconomical. Researchers had made many successful
attempts to design pile foundation in most economical way by designing raft to share a
portion of load which may be directly transferred to soil as combined Piled Raft Foundation
system. In the present paper, a parametric study was carried out taking pile raft aspect ratio,
space of pile to diameter ratio, thickness of raft, pile area to raft area ratio, settlement or
differential settlement as variables and some guide lines are suggested to adopt various
parameters of piled raft foundation elements and its geometry to optimise combined Piled
Raft Foundation (CPRF). The results from the proposed model are found to be in good
agreement with the expressions available in the published literature.
Keywords: Piled Raft Foundation, Finite element Method, Finite Layer Technique, Aspect
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INTRODUCTION
Piles can be included in a foundation for two main design reasons: in order to provide
adequate bearing capacity or to reduce settlements to an acceptable level. A different
approach, involving the use of piles as settlement reducers, has been postulated by
researchers. The basic concept of this approach is that the foundation comprises only the
number of piles that are necessary to reduce settlements to a tolerable amount and the loads
from the structure are transmitted, via a raft, in part to the piles and in part to the foundation
soil (load shared between the raft and piles). This approach allows the piled footing design to
be optimized and the number of piles to be significantly reduced. In the design of piled rafts,
design engineers have to understand the mechanism of load transfer from the raft to the piles
and to the soil. i.e soil structure interaction needs to understand. The concept of piled-raft
foundations is by no means new. Various methods of analysis of piled-raft foundations have
been developed in particular over the past few decades. [1-6]. Many researchers have studied
independently the behaviour of piled raft through analytical and numerical models [7-15].
Initially a Simplified approach to find out approximate behavioral response of pile raft, is
attempted [16-20]. Finite Elements Method is used by most of researchers to model the piled
raft and found it most suitable as the interaction between pile to pile , soil to pile, raft to soil
and pile to raft is a complex problem and very difficult to model via simplified approach[2133]. Some researchers tried to combine the Finite layer and Finite Element approach to
simulate piled raft more precisely. Finite Layer technique is employed to determine the
behavior of soil and Finite element Method is for the analysis raft[34-38]. Variational
approach which uses the principle of minimum of potential energy to simulate the response of
the foundation system is employed by many researcher [39-42].Heavily loaded structures
have been supported successfully on the piled-raft and have been instrumented and well
monitored and results have been reported in literature [43-44]. In this paper, a simplified and
economical approach to determine the load carrying capacity of piled-raft combined
foundation (CPRF) systems by considering the contribution of the raft towards the overall
bearing capacity of the foundation system is suggested, but this potential is not exploited due
to the lack of theoretical and experimental research on the behaviour of piled-rafts at failure.
Based on results of a finite element analyses, a simple criterion is proposed to evaluate the
ultimate vertical load of a piled raft as a function of its component capacities, which can be
simply evaluated by the conventional bearing capacity theories. The results presented in the
paper thus provide a economical foundation system in simplified manner.
UKIERI
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Concrete Congress - Innovations in Concrete Construction
shown in Figure 1 and 2. The forces induced in the raft and piles of the foundation system
were noted down along with its displacement and stress field.
Unit
[kN/m]
[kN/m]
[kN/m]
[-]
[kN/m2]
[kN/m2]
[]
[]
[]
[-]
Value
16
19
2.000E+04
0.35
7407.407
3.210E+04
80
0
0
1.0
PARAMETRIC STUDY
A parametric study was performed to link and establish the influence of various key
parameters of the piled-raft foundation system on its load carrying capacity. The foundation
system was modeled using the PLAXIS 3D foundation finite element based software. The
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key geometrical variables used in the generation of foundation system are summarized in
Table 2. Numbers of cases were modeled in the PLAXIS and studied by considering various
combinations of the pile aspect ratio(l/d), spacing ratio(s/d) and the foundation thickness of
the piled-raft foundation system. The aspect ratio (l/d) of piles will indicate the contribution
from piles of the foundation system having some limited width. The spacing-diameter ratio
(s/d) of piles will indicate the number of piles that a raft of limited width could accommodate.
It will also establish the influence of pile interference on the load carrying capacity, occurring
in a system having closely spaced load carrying members such as piles and with the raft of
the system. The raft thickness indirectly introduces the effect of stiffness of the foundation
system into the study. The diameters of piles used in the analysis were 300mm, 350mm and
400mm.
Table 2 Summary of the key geometrical variables
Aspect ratio ( l/d)
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
55
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N=4; l/d=20
Figure 3 Influence of s/d ratio on load carrying capacity of raft pile system
Effect of Pile Aspect-ratio (l/d)
Aspect-ratio (l/d) of pile was varied by keeping the spacing of piles in the foundation system
as a constant parameter at optimum value of five times the pile diameter. Results were
generated in term of load carrying capacity of the piled raft system under a uniform vertical
floor loading of 300kN/m2 uniformly applied on the whole of raft. The number of piles in
the foundation system was varied from a minimum value of 4 . Figures 4, 5 and 6 show
influence of aspect-ratio on the load carrying capacity. These figures indicate that the load
carrying capacity of the foundation system increases by adopting piles having higher value of
l/d ratios which provides more interfacial shear resistance due to increase in the surface area
at higher value of l/d ratio and number of piles in the foundation system. There is a steep
increase in the load carrying capacity at high value of l/d ratio. This occurs mainly because of
mobilization of large magnitude of the interfacial shear at higher depths along the length of
pile due to high surcharge. These figures indicate some inherent capacity of the strip (about
600 kN/m) in absence of piles depending upon its length and unit width and the contribution
of piles toward the load carrying capacity of the foundation system. The contribution from
piles is a function of its aspect ratio and the s/d ratio. The s/d ratio indirectly controls the
number of piles in the group. It is therefore, recommended to fix the spacing of piles in the
group at the (optimum) minimum spacing of five times its diameter and play with the length
of the piles to achieve the required design-capacity of the piled raft foundation system.
However, it must be noted that enhancement of load carrying capacity by increasing the
aspect ratio of piles beyond an average value of 60 not possible. Because, the failure mode of
piled raft changes from a local to global failure possessing some fixed capacity beyond this
value of aspect-ratio.
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L/D RATIO OF PILE
s/d=5,
LOAD (KN)
N=4,
t=400
Figure 4 Influence of l/d ratio on load carrying capacity of piled raft system
L/D RATIO OF PILE
l/d=5,
LOAD (KN)
N=6,
t=400
Figure 5 Influence of l/d ratio on load carrying capacity of piled raft system
N=9, l/d=20,
t=400
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loading of 300kN/m2 applied on the whole floor. The results are found to be in good
agreement reported [44].
(1)
The variation of the factor is also shown in Fig. 8 with the pile aspect ratio. This can be used
to assess the factor, depending upon the pile aspect ratio.
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From parametric study it is found that pile to raft area (Area under piles to total area under
raft ) plays an important role in reducing differential as well as total settlement of combined
piled raft foundation. Differential settlement reduces with increase in pile to raft area ratio
continuously and number of piles may be adopted as per permissible differential settlement
and total permissible settlement.
CONCLUSION
1. The load carrying capacity of the piled-raft foundation system increases with pile aspectratio. It increases by 70% when l/d ratio varies from 10 to 60. The percentage of load
shared between the piles and raft component of the system also increases with increase in
l/d ratio. It increases between 50 to 650% when l/d ratio varies from 10 to 60.
2. Increase in the diameter of the piles enhances the load carrying capacity of the piled-raft
system. Change in the diameter of pile increases the capacity between 15 to 20%.
3. The load carrying capacity of piled-raft increases, continuously, up to spacing ratio (s/d)
of 5.
4. The load carrying capacity of piled raft increases with raft thickness upto a limit and
beyond it raft thickness does not have any appreciable effect on its carrying capacity
rather it is useful for some other important structural functions like increase in the
punching shear capacity etc
5. The carrying capacity of the piled-raft can be determined easily, in absence of finite
element based software, by superimposing the capacities of its components and
multiplying it by a capacity reduction factor.
6. Total settlement reduces with increases of pile aspect ratio. Total settlement may be
reduced upto 90% with the increase in pile aspect ratio. It is observed that optimum l/d
ratio is 30 if piles are to be designed to reduce settlement.
7. Differential settlement reduces with the increase in raft thickness and optimum thickness
is found as 2.3 to 2.5 times the thickness required safeguarding against punching shear.
8. Differential settlement may also be reduced with the increase in pile to raft area ratio i.e.
increasing more number of piles of increasing diameter of piles. The minimum number
of piles may be adopted as per permissible settlement or differential settlement for
optimal design.
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