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Analysis and Design of Piled Raft Foundation

Chanraksmey Roth; Pongpipat Anantanasakul

Abstract:
A number of high rise buildings are built on pile raft foundation system which is difficult
to understand its behavior. Soil-structure interaction of piled raft foundation involves
pile-soil interaction, pile-soil-pile interaction, raft-soil interaction, and pile-raft
interaction. Hence, proper methods to analyze and design are needed. This study aims to
evaluation design methods for this particular piled raft foundation. Furthermore, it offers
special features of each methods so that useful pieces of information which has drawn
from this study is able to help geotechnical engineers in selecting appropriate design
method. A series of case studies in Dubai, South Korea are to be discussed. A discussion
of the case studies concerning simplified method, finite element method is made and
compare to field measurement. Result and conclusion????
Introduction
Piled-raft foundation is a practical and cost-effective foundation solution for high-rise
buildings as it offers a great bearing capacity and decreases settlement. The Piled raft
foundation is a new concept of designing foundation which total load from
superstructure is partially shared by the raft through contact with soil the rest of the load
is shared by piles through skin friction and toe bearing resistance. The conventional
Piled-raft founation design ignores contribution of raft, then all loads are transferred to
soil through piles. If raft, on the other hand, carries the total loads coming from the
superstructure, the thickness of the raft will be relatively thick which increases total cost
of foundation. In addition, the excessive settelement occurs. In such a condition, the
Piled Raft foundation should be employed, so that, ultimate load capacity, the settlement
and differtial settlement performance are improved. Also, the thickness of the raft
decreases. The important criterion governing the design of pile raft is the relative
proportion of load caried by raft and piles aL and the effect of the additional pile
support on foundation settlement as (Y.M. EI- Mossallamy 2009).
To ensure continuity of the soil bearing resistance to the raft, the safty factor of the piles
is reduced than the normal safety factor for conventional pile design so that the
settlement of the piles are big enough to have consistent contact between soil and raft.
Nevertheless, the magnitude of settlement must be smaller than allowable settlement (K.
Amornfa 2012).

Previous Studies
Poulos (1980) introduced a simplified method to analyze and design the piled raft
foundation. The concept of analysis is similar to analysis of freestanding pile groups
except that a single pile is attached circular cap resting on the soil. The analysis for
Load-settlement curve to failure almost assembles in principle to the analysis for largediameter pile in Poulos 1980 Section 5.4.
Poulos (2001) discussed a series of available methods to analyze the piled raft behavior
as well as their capacities and limitation. The simplified methods were recommended to
use for preliminary design or for verify purpose whereas three dimensional analyses,
mainly FLAC 3-D is the most powerful numerical methods among methods discussed
herein.
M. Tariq (2007) investigated the effectiveness of a group of 1072 piles for controlling
settlement of 76m in diameter of raft in weak rock. 2D axi-symmetrical and 3D Finite
Element Method are employed. The results showed that 2D axi-symmetrical FEM model
is able to simulate the complex 3D problem with a good accuracy.

Poulos (2009) described a pile raft design process for high-rise buildings including 3
case studies in Dubai, The Emirates Twin Towers, The Burj Dubai, and the Nakheel Tall
Tower. A numerical computer analysis, Geotechnical Analysis of Raft with Piles
(GARP) was used. For the Emirate Project, the settlement would be as well-predicted as
the pile load test was not achieved. However, the measurement during construction was
approximately 25% of the prediction because of conservative assumption made in
deriving the pile settlement interaction factors. For the Burj Dubai, the maximum
settlement predicted is larger than observation. Also the performance of piled raft
foundation of this project exceeded expectation. For the Nakheel Tall Tower, the
foundation pare was designed economically. The maximum settlements obtained from
the GARP analysis was 95mm which was very close to Golder using a full three
dimensional finite element analysis with the Plaxis 3D Foundation program.
Andr (2011) compared FEM analysis of piled raft foundation in 2D (strain strain
condition) and 3D by employing Plaxis 2D and 3D Foundation. it was found that two
dimensional model (2D) was overestimate the settlement about 30%, raft bending
moment about 30% and the pile force about 10%. Also, the result demonstrated that a
special attention should be paid while using plane strain models as inaccuracies
happened such as computing differential settlement or the bending moment in the longer
direction. Author suggested that as the problem goes more complex, the 3D FEM should
be carried out for detail design.
Amornfa (2012) discussed the current practice on foundation design of high-rise
buildings in Bangkok,Thailand. The conventional method of analysis (the combined
stress equation and the plate on springs analysis) and 3D FEM were compared. It found
that despite the neglect of pile-pile and raft-pile interaction, the plate on pile springs
method offer relatively large dissimilar results if compared to 3D FEM.
Hussein (2013) stated that piled raft foundation offers a good load capacity and decrease
settlement in cost-saving manner if compared with the traditional foundation design. the
percentage ratio of bearing loads between the pile and the raft was presented. Plaxis 3D
Foundation is used to modeling problem and compared with experimental work of the
same problem with Program Ansys. Results showed that the load carrying by piles
decreased as the spacing to diameter ratio increased.

Simplified Method
Simplified methods are usually used in the preliminary or feasibility studies of most
geotechnical project. In the practical point of view, simplified method is strongly
recommended for assisting designers or planner to quickly compute the number piles,
piles length, bearing capacity of the piled raft and its settlement (Y. M. El-Mossallamy
2009). In this report, Poulos-Davis-Randolph (PDR) Method is briefly described.
Poulos-Davis-Randolph (PDR) Method
This method is employed to assess vertical bearing capacity of a pile raft foundation
using simple approaches, the ultimate load capacity is normally taken the smallest value
of the following two values:

the sumation of the ultimate capacities of the all piles and the raft.
the ultimate capacities of a block containing the piles and the raft, plus that of the
portion of the raft outside the periphery of the piles.
1. The stiffness of piled raft foundation can be estimated as follows:
Kpr=(Kp+Kr(1-acp))/(1- acp2Kr/Kp)
where Kpr= stiffness of piled raft
Kp= stiffness of piled raft
Kr= stiffness of the raft alone
acp= raft-pile interation factor
2. The proportion of the total applied load carried by the raft is
Pr/Pt=Kr(1- acp)/(Kp+Kr(1- acp))=X
where Pr= Load carried by the raft
Pt= Total applied load
3. The raft-pile interaction factor acp can be estimated as follows:
acp=1-ln(rc/r0)/z
where rc= average radius of pile cap
ro= radius of pile
4. The total applied load, P1=Pup(1-X)
Where Pup= Ultimate load capacity of the piles in the group
X= proportion of load carried by the piles

By using this method, the stiffness of the raft is able to be computed manually from
elastic theory. Also the stiffnesss of the single pile is calculated from the closed form
approximate solution of Randolph and Wroth (1978) while the group settlement ratio
(used for computing the pile group stiffness) is approximated by Rs=n0.5, where n = the
number of piles.
Limitation
For the very stiff or very flexible pile raft, the settlement of the pile-raft system is
needed, the elastic-based analysis is likely to be adequate.
This method is not suitabe for raft containing bending moment.
Influence of Pile Arrangement: It was found that the settlment of a system depends
primarily on the number of piles in the group, and not on the arrangement of the piles.

Burlands Approach
Burland (1995) introduced a method that piles are designed to act as settlement reducer
and to develop their full bearing capacity at the design load. Burland offered simplified
process to design piled raft foundation as following:
1. Estimate the total long term load settlement relationship for raft without piles
2. Assess an acceptable design settlement Sd, which should include a margin of
safety.
3. P1 is the load carried by the raft corresponding to Sd.
4. The load excess P0-P1 is assumed to be carried by settlement-reducing piles. The
raft resistance of these piles will be fully mobilized and therefore no factor of
safety is applied but about 0.9 should be applied to the conservative best
estimate of ultimate shaft capacity, Psu.
5. If the piles are located below columns which carry a load in excess of Psu, the
piled raft may be analyzed as a raft on which reduced coloumn loads act. At such
columns, the reduced load Qr is: Qr=Q-0.9Psu
6. The process for estimating the settlement of the piled raft is not explicitly set out
by Burland. However, it would appear reasonabe to adopt the approximate
approach of Randolph (1994) in which: Spr=Sr*Kr/Kpr
Where Spr= settlement of piled raft

Sr=settlemtn of raft without piles subjected to the total applied


loading
Kr= stiffness of raft
Kpr=stiffness of piled raft

Finite Element Method


PLAXIS 3D Foundation Program
This program is one the most widely used tools to analyze the complex problem in field
of geotechnical engineering. Plaxis 3D Foundation is a high-performance and computer
oriented finite element method software which was created by Vermeer and Brinkgreve
(1995). This program offered a special feature that pile is able to embedded in soils and
is assumed to be slender beam element. Also, most of interactions of piled raft
foundation are taken into account. Moreover, Plaxis 3D Foundation is capable to
perform the following tasks:
-model and analyze piled raft in arbitrary shape
-Apply operating loads or other design performance conditions
-Study physical responses, such as stress levels, distributions, or the impact of
electromagnetic fields.
FLAC 3D
FLAC 3D, a commercially available computer program, provided a complete 3D
analysis of piled raft foundation system. The special feature of this program is to
eliminate some approximate assumptions that simplified method used to be assumed.
Non-linear analysis is also performed by FLAC 3D, but a big amount of time will need
to be consumed for analyzed the piled raft foundation. On the other hand, FLAC 3D
gives a good result in terms of load-settlement relation.
The Essential of Pile-Raft Interaction
A number of analysts of pile raft foundation used structural analysis programs to
represent a plate and the piles as springs. Then the spring stiffness of the piles was
computed for a single isolated pile and ignored the effect raft-pile and pile-raft
interaction. In a result, the stiffness of the foundation was too large and settlement was
too low.
Application to Practical Design
It is recommended to follow 3-stage design process for piled raft:
1. The simple PDR method can be employed to roughly compute the number of piles
needed to satisfy the overall bearing capacity and settlement needed.

2. A simple approach can be employed to assess the maximum column load which the raft
can bear without a pile. This will provide a means of assessing under which columns
piles are required, for a particular raft thickness, and the requirement for such piles.
3. Employing numerical analyses such as Plaxis 3D Foundation or FLAC 3D can offer a
detailed analysis for final design. Also it provides detailed estimates of settlement and
differential settlement under various loading combinations, and also details of the raft
and pile behavior for structural design.

Case Studies
Case Study 1: The Emirates Project
The Emirates Project is a twin tower in Dubai which is a 8 th tallest building in the world
for the office tower and 17th tallest building in the world for the Hotel Tower. The
foundations of these two towers were large diameter of piles with raft. The main strata at
Emirates site was mostly found in sand. The major design parameters for the foundation
system were the ultimate skin friction of the piles, the ultimate end bearing resistance of
the piles, the ultimate bearing capacity of the raft, and the Youngs modulus of the soils
for both the raft and the pile behavior under static loading. Moreover, the GARP
(Geotechnical Analysis of Raft with Piles) (Poulos 1994) was employed as analysis
method.
Comparison between predicted and measured test pile behavior was carried out. A fair
agreement of settlement prediction and measurement of pile was revealed as shown in
Fig

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Case Study 2: Storage Tank


The Storage tank is in circular shape with 76m in diameter and raft thickness is 9m. 2D
axi-symmetrical and 3D finite element methods were adopted.

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Type of construction: Storage Tank

Shape: Circular

Diameter=76m

Raft depth=9m

Number of piles=1072m

Piles depth=12.7m

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Figure showed the 3D modelling of piled raft.


Figure showed that the different of settelment in 2D axi-symmetrical and 3D finite
element models is less than 10%. It indicated that 2D axi-symmetrical models was in
acceptable range.
FigurePoulos (2001) compared load settlement from various methods, it was obvious
that PDR method agreed well with FLAC3-D whereas FLAC2-D over-predicted the
settlements. This indicated that PDR is useful for simple pile raft foundation.

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A case of a piled raft foundation with 25 bored piled and the raft thickness is 1m. the
width of the raft is 55m. three analysis methods were adapted in this case study: Plate on
Pile Springs Method, Plate on Both pile and Soil Springs, and 3D FEM (Plaxis 3D
Foundation program). Figure
Figure showed that the settlement from the three methods were largely different. 3D
FEM provided the highest settlement among the three. This indicated that Plate on Pile
Springs Method and Plate on Both pile and Soil Springs underestimated the settlement
despite these two methods ignored pile-raft interaction and serveral approximate
assumption. In this case, it is recommended to employed 3D FEM for the detail design
or last verification of the design.

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Case study
A pile raft foundation consisted of 16m in width and piles as following:
-Piled raft A: 49 piles (2m in piles spacing)
-Piled raft B: 16 piles (4m in piles spacing)
-Piled raft C: 9 piles (6m in piles spacing)
All the result showed the same trend that plane strain analysis in Plaxis 2D
underestimated the differential settlement.

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Results
Conclusion

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