ROLE OF RELATIVE STIFFNESS IN PILED-RAFT FOUNDATION SYSTEM
Prashant Garg, Assistant professor (Civil Engineering), GNDEC,Ludhiana,prashant.ced@gmail.com J.N.Jha, Professor and Head (Civil Engineering), GNDEC, Ludhiana,jagadanand@gmail.com Harvinder Singh, Associate Professor (Civil Engineering) GNDEC, Ludhiana,hvs1221@gmail.com
ABSTRACT: In the present study a parametric study to observe the behaviour of pile raft foundation system (PRFS) with relative stiffness of raft is conducted by modelling the PRFS in FEM based software Plaxis 3D. Elasto-Plastic material model is used for soil and Linear Elastic model was taken for Pile and Raft. Mohr Coulomb model has been used for analysis..It is observed that Stiffness of soil has a great influence on the load transfer mechanism of PRFS. With the increase in soil stiffness, the load transfer by piles decreases while load shared by raft increases and the overall and differential settlement reduces. It is also observed that raft thickness has negligible effect on load transfer mechanism and settlement of foundation.
INTRODUCTION Foundation is an integral part of a structure and costs about 20% of the total project cost. An attempt has been being made by researchers to economies the foundation without compromising the safety and design of Pile raft is one of such example. In conventional design of pile only piles are designed to transfer the whole weight of superstructure to soil whereas raft piles are designed as a pile cap and has no role in load transfer to soil. In pile raft foundations, raft is also designed to transfer partial load to the soil hence the number of piles or its geometry (diameter, length) may be reduced without compromising the safety of structure. In design of Piled Raft foundation stiffness of soil over foundation and piles plays an important role. 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. Many researchers have studied independently the behaviour of piled raft through analytical and numerical models. Heavily loaded structures have been supported successfully on the piled-raft and results have been reported in literature [1-7]. In the present study, effect of relative stiffness of piled raft foundation to the soil stiffness over various parameters as settlement, load shared by
piles to raft etc are observed using a three dimensional Finite Element based software (Plaxis 3D) in which octahedral elements are taken for analysis, Elasto-Plastic material model is used for soil and Linear Elastic model is taken for Pile and Raft. Mohr Coulomb model is used for analysis.
PARAMETRIC STUDY A parametric study is performed to link and establish the influence of various key parameters of the piled-raft foundation system on its load carrying capacity and percentage of load shared by piles. The foundation system is modeled using the PLAXIS 3D foundation finite element based software. The key geometrical variables used in the generation of foundation system are summarized in Table 1. Numbers of cases are modeled and studied by considering various combinations of the Modulus of elasticity of soil, raft and pile keeping the length(L), diameter(d) and raft thickness(t) constant The length of pile is taken as 12m, diameter as 0.4m and raft thickness as 0.5 m. The foundation thickness of the piled-raft foundation system is also varied to observe the influence of raft thickness on overall settlement and differential settlement.
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Prashant Garg, J.N.Jha , Harvinder Singh Table 1 List of Variables Mod.of Elasticity of Soil(E s ) kN/m 2
Mod. of Elasticity of Raft(Er) kN/m 2
Raft Thickness (t), mm 25000 50000 75000 2.0x10 7
2.5x10 7 3.0x10 7
500 1000 1500 100000 125000 3.5x10 7
4.0x10 7 2000 2500 3000
The clay soil is considered for the parametric study and analysis. The properties of the soil are shown in Table 2.
Table 2 Properties of soil Property Unit Value Unit weight unsat Saturated unit weight sat
[kN/m] [kN/m] 16 18.7 Young modulus Eref
Poisson ratio Shear modulus Gref Young modulus Eoed Cohesion cref Friction angle Dialantancy angle Interface strength R inter
The foundation system is simulated under a uniform vertical floor load of 187kN/m 2 imposed on whole of raft and its behavior is observed. A typical meshed model of the foundation system is shown in Fig.1 and 2.
Fig 1: Typical finite element mesh of piled-raft
Fig 2: Typical 3D finite element mesh of soil and PRFS
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Effect of Stiffness of Soil : Overall and differential settlement of foundation system decreases with increase in Modulus of elasticity (E) of soil which is a indicator of soil stiffness as shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. The percentage decrease in settlement is as large as 54.4% if Modulus of Elasticity increases from 25000 kN/m 2 to 50000 kN/m 2 and it decreases upto 20% when E of Soil increases from100000 kN/m 2
to 125000 kN/m 2 ,While for the same range of Modulus of elasticity differential settlement decreases upto73.3 % initially and reduced to 30% when E of Soil increases from100000 kN/m 2 to 125000 kN/m 2 .
Fig 3: Influence of stiffness on total settlement of raft pile system 0 25 50 75 100 125 150 0 1 2 3 4 E
o f
S o i l
( K N / M 2 ) X
1 0 3
Settlement (mm) Page 2 of 5
Role of Relative Stiffness in Piled raft Foundation system
Fig 4: Influence of stiffness of soil on differential settlement of raft pile system
Fig 5: Influence of stiffness on the contact pressue on raft in raft pile system
It is also observed that with increase in modulus of Elasticity of soil, the contact pressure on raft increases marginally (fig 5) and load shared by raft( Pile cap) increases and hence load on piles decreases as shown in Fig. 6.
Fig 6: Influence of stiffness of Soil to % load shared by piles for different stiffness of Raft
It is also observed from Fig. 7 that with the increase of Elastic Modulus of Raft ( indicator of stiffness), the percentage shared by piles increases, but the increase is significant as the relative stiffness of raft (ratio of Mod. of elasticity of raft to the Mod. of Elasticity of soil) increases upto a value of 400 and after that the rate of percentage of total load shared by pile become almost constant as indicated in Fig. 7. The relationship between the relative stiffness of raft with percentage of total load shared by piles is estimated by following a polynomial equation (1). The regression constant is 97.6% which shows a good relationship.
P l /P=-4x10 5 (E R /E S ) 2 +.051(E R /E S )+35.53, -- (1) Where P l is % of total ultimate load shared by Pile, P is total ultimate load bored by Pile Raft system, E R is the modulus of elasticity of raft and E S is the Modulus of
Fig 7: Influence of relative stiffness of raft to Soil to % load shared by piles
Raft Thickness: Fig. 8 indicates that the raft thickness does not have any appreciable effect on the load carrying capacity of the piled raft system. Rather it is useful for reason other than the load carrying capacity viz: enhanced punching shear capacity of the raft and stiffness of footing. In the parametric study, the raft thickness of the footing system is varied by keeping the spacing, number and diameter of piles as constant. Uniform vertical floor loading of 187kN/m 2 is applied on the whole floor.
Fig 8: Variation of the load carrying capacity with raft thickness The results are found to be in good agreement with the reported value in literature [8]. The load shared by the pile also increases marginally upto a raft thickness of 1.5 m after that it shows a decreasing trend. The overall load taken by the pile raft foundation increases with the increase in raft thickness with a non significant rate. With the increase of 400% in raft thickness, the load bearing capacity increases about only 24%. The overall settlement with the increase in raft thickness also shows similar trend as depicted from Fig. 9.
Fig 9: Variation of the Settlement with raft thickness
CONCLUSION The following conclusions are drawn from the study: Stiffness of soil has a very significant impact on overall settlement and differential settlement of combined piled raft system. With increase in soil stiffness contact pressure on raft increases and load shared by piles decreases. As Relative stiffness of raft, the load shared by piles increases significantly and beyond a value of 400, relative stiffness has almost no influence on load sharing mechanism. With increases in relative stiffness of raft to soil, the load carrying by pile raft system increases and follow a polynomial equation as P l /P=-4x10 -5 (E R /E s ) 2 +0.051(E R /E s )+35.53. with good correlation coefficient R 2 =97.6 Raft thickness has not a very significant impact on load carrying capacity as by increasing 400% raft thickness, load bearing capacity increases only 24%.Raft thickness of the PRFS also has no impact on settlement. 42 44 46 48 50 52 54 0 2 4 6 8 10 %
L o a d
s h a r e d
b y
P I l e
Relative stiffness of Raft( E R /E S )X 100 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 0 1 2 3 L O A D ( k N )
X
1 0 3
RAFT THICKNESS(m) LOAD 0 1 2 0 1 2 3 S E T T L E M E N T ( m m )
RAFT THICKNESS (m) Page 4 of 5
Role of Relative Stiffness in Piled raft Foundation system REFERENCES 1 Randolph, M.F. (1994), Design Methods for Pile Groups and Piled Rafts S.O.A. Report, 13th the International Conference of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering, New Delhi, Vol. 5, 61-82 2 Poulos, H.G. (2001), Piled raft foundation: design and applications, Geotechnique, 51(2), 95-113. 3 Gandhi, S. R and. Maharaj, D.K. (1996), Settlement Behaviour of Piled Raft Foundations, Indian Geotechnical Conference, December 7-11, Madras, India. 4 OH E.Y.N, Huang M , Surarak, Adamec R and Balasurbamaniam A.S.(2008), Finite Element Modeling for Piled Raft Foundations in Sand, Proceedings of 11th Asia- Pacific Conference on structural Engineering and Construction, Taipei, Taiwan, Nov. 19-21, 2008.
5 Singh N. T., Singh B.,(2008), Interaction Analysis for Piled Rafts in Cohesive Soils, Proceedings of 12th International Conference of International Association For Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics, Goa, India, 2008. 6 Lee J .H., Youngho K. and Sangseom J . (2009),Three-Dimensional Analysis of Bearing Behavior of Piled Raft on Soft Clay, Computer and Geotechnics, 37, 103-114. 7 Singh K., J ha J .N.,Singh H. and Garg P., (2012). An Innovative procedure for Proportioning Piled Strip foundation System, Proceeding, Indian Geotechnical Conference, Vol-1. Pp 564-567. 8 BIS-2911-part III (1980), Code of Practice for Design and Construction of Pile Foundation-Under reamed piles.