Prediction of Piled Raft Foundation Settlement – A Case Study

Abstract

Piled raft foundation is an effective foundation method. For the last few decades, the rapid growth of cities all over the world led to a tremendous increase in the number as well as the height of high-rise and super high-rise buildings, even in unfavourable subsoil conditions. Piled raft foundation concept, in which piles are only used for reducing the settlement, not for carrying the whole load from the structure, has been successfully applied for many projects. In this paper the result from the Author’s experimental study, which strongly supports the concept of settlement-reducing piles is reviewed. Basing on the experiment, which is surprisingly in good agreement with the monitoring results of case histories many years later, a simplified design method is proposed. In this paper, the method is used for conceptual design of a large high-rise complex. In combination with FEM analyses using Plaxis 3D, the simplified method is a reliable tool for conceptual design of piled-raft.