Discussions and Closures
elements were used both for piles and soil in the numerical
Discussion of “3D Numerical Model for
Piled Raft Foundation” by Anup Sinha and
A. M. Hanna
DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)GM.1943-5622.0000674
Jun Yang1
1
Associate Professor, Key Laboratory of Civil Engineering Safety and
Durability of China Education Ministry, Tsinghua Univ., Beijing
100084, China. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4123-2460.
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E-mail: junyang@tsinghua.edu.cn
The original paper investigated the performance of piled raft foun-
dations under vertical loading by three-dimensional (3D) FEM nu-
merical simulation. The topic is interesting, and the findings on the
effects of the key parameters governing the performance of this
type of foundation are instructive. However, there are two serious
issues that should be addressed and corrected, as discussed herein.
1. The 3D numerical model for the piled raft foundation is
unclear, and there are some mistakes or flaws concerning the
boundary condition and body meshing.
For this typical vertically loaded foundation system with two
perpendicular symmetrical axes, only one-quarter of the total sys-
tem needs to be incorporated in the numerical model, as was done
in the original paper. However, the boundary displacement condi-
tions of the model are not exactly correct. According to Figs. 1 and
2 of the original paper, the nodes on the vertical plane AA0 G0 G are
free except for the nodes on the lines A0 G0 and G0 G; meanwhile, the
nodes on the vertical plane AA0 H0 H are also free except for the
nodes on the lines A0 H0 and H0 H. However, the widely recognized
setting for this situation is that the node movements normal to all
boundary surfaces are restricted except for those on the top surface
(Fakharian et al. 2014). The most used commercial code, Plaxis
3D, treats these as the standard or general fixity conditions, which
means that roller conditions are assumed at the vertical sides of the
geometry, and a full fixed condition is assumed at the base
(Kranthikumar et al. 2017). So, setting the displacement of these
far-field vertical boundary planes to be free, as was done in the orig-
inal paper, is not correct.
To decrease the effect of the far-field artificial boundary to ac-
ceptable limits, the width and depths of the FEM soil body must be
set big enough. In the original paper, the horizontal length of the
continuum was taken as 30 times the pile diameter, and the vertical
depth was taken as 2 times the pile length, which only considered
the size of a single pile. But the foundation system is a pile group
with a raft, whose effect zone is influenced not only by the size of a
single pile but also the number of piles and the raft size. In the case
study of pile spacing, the pile was 15.0 m in length and 1.0 m in
diameter, which means the horizontal length and vertical depth of
the FEM model were both taken as 30 m. However, in Table 3 of
the original paper, the biggest raft size is 40 m  40 m (L  B);
both the horizontal length and the vertical depth of the model are
apparently not enough.
Another inconsistency concerns the shapes of the piles. According
to the original paper, numerical tests were conducted on piles
having circular, octagonal, and square cross sections, and no sig-
nificant effects of cross-section shape were concluded. The solid
© ASCE 07017015-1
Int. J. Geomech., 2018, 18(2): 07017015
model, but no details of the meshing of differently shaped piles
were given. Except for the square shape, the meshing of the pile
group is relatively difficult, and many more elements are needed
to simulate the shape of a circle or octagon. Furthermore, the
original paper did not tell on what basis these differently shaped
piles were compared. The same cross-sectional area and same pe-
rimeter must give different results.
2. Some results of the numerical simulation seem unreasonable,
and the key issue of load-sharing mechanism is not addressed.
In Fig. 6 of the original paper, the load capacity of the unpiled
raft is bigger than the pile spacing of 10D, or even 8D, when the
load is smaller than 420 kPa. This result is apparently incorrect
because the only difference between the piled and unpiled raft is the
use of stiffer piles in the piled raft to replace the original soil in the
unpiled raft. The system of the piled raft must be stiffer and stronger
than that of the unpiled raft, but the load-settlement curve in Fig. 6
of the original paper tells another story.
The caption of the horizontal axis in Fig. 14 of the original paper
should be Raft thickness (m), not Distance from raft center (m).
From Figs. 13 and 14, in the discussion of the effect of raft thick-
ness, the original paper drew the conclusion that the settlement
measured at the center of the raft decreased with an increase in the
raft thickness up to approximately 1.5 m, beyond which the settle-
ment increased with an increase in the raft thickness. This conclu-
sion seems different from the commonsense conclusion that the set-
tlement at the center of the raft would monotonously decrease with
an increase in the raft stiffness (thickness). The reason for this
strange finding is that the original paper did not separate the effect
of raft stiffness and raft gravity. With an increase in the raft thick-
ness, the settlement at the center of the raft decreased because of the
increase in raft stiffness but increased because of the increase of
raft gravity, which increased the compression of the subsoil.
In the introduction, the load-sharing mechanism of this piled raft
foundation system seems like the main contribution of the original
paper. But there are only some figures that show the differential set-
tlements of the center and corner points of the raft, such as Figs. 7,
9, 12, and 14 of the original paper. The differential settlements can
only indirectly represent the load sharing between the raft and the
piles. In fact, there are some parameters that can directly represent
the load sharing, such as the proportion of the total applied load car-
ried by the raft, which can be defined as follows:
X ¼ Pr =Pt (1)
where Pr = load carried by raft; and Pt = total applied load (Poulos
2002). But this parameter is not clarified in the original paper, and
the load-sharing mechanism remains unspecified. For a numerical
study like the original paper, there is a condition to investigate the
load-sharing mechanism because the numerical results include
everything needed, such as the pile-head reactions, through which
not only the proportion of the total applied load carried by the piles
but also the piles’ load distributions can be calculated.
References
Fakharian, K., Meskar, M., and Mohammadlou, A. (2014). “Effect of sur-
charge pressure on pile static axial load test results.” Int. J. Geomech.,
10.1061/(ASCE)GM.1943-5622.0000310, 04014024.
Int. J. Geomech.
 Kranthikumar, A., Sawant, V. A., Kumar, P., and Shukla, S. K. (2017).
“Numerical and experimental investigations of granular anchor piles in
loose sandy soil subjected to uplift loading.” Int. J. Geomech., 10.1061
/(ASCE)GM.1943-5622.0000733, 04016059.
Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by 177.32.221.146 on 02/13/18. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.
Plaxis 3D. [Computer software]. Plaxis, Delft, Netherlands.
Poulos, H. G. (2002). “Simplified design procedure for piled raft founda-
tion.” International Deep Foundations Congress 2002, Geotechnical
special publication 116, ASCE, Reston, VA, 441–458.

© ASCE 07017015-2 Int. J. Geomech.

Int. J. Geomech., 2018, 18(2): 07017015