Settlement analysis for piled raft foundations

Abstract

During the last few decades, the quick growth of cities all over the world led to a rapid increase in the number and height of high-rise and super high-rise buildings, even in unfavourable subsoil conditions. Piled raft foundation concept, in which piles only for reducing the settlement, not for carrying the whole load from the superstructure, has been successfully applied for many projects. This design philosophy has also been increasingly applied for high-rise buildings. In this paper the result from the Author's experimental study, which strongly supports the concept of settlement-reducers are reviewed. The experimental results are surprisingly in good agreement with case histories many years later. Applications of the proposed simplified design method in combination with FEM in design of piled-raft foundations for high-rises are also discussed.