6. Describe the importance of raft and mat foundation.

Raft or mat foundations are thickened concrete slabs that support a number of columns or walls; hence, one way views rafts as large combined footings. It is a large concrete slab used to interface columns in several lines with the base soil. It may occupy the entire foundation area or only a part of it. Raft foundation may be preferred over spread footings on strata that are erratic or have low bearing capacities, or they have a heterogeneous character, or where large differential settlement is likely if one were the foundation is below the water table and there is need to eliminate water infiltration into basement-type installations. Importance : It may be able to overcome differential settlement problems for the raft acts as a unit. Load incurred by raft foundation will be transferred to the underlying soil by reinforced concrete continuous slab by covering the entire site structure. Raft foundation can across the low soil bearing capacity and will distribute the loads on wide area. It spreads the loads over a larger area when the construction takes place on the soft or loose soils with low bearing capacity. Reduce differential settlements as the concrete slab resists differential movements between the loading positions. To carry loads which are too heavy to be supported by a shallow foundation. The loads are to be transferred to deeper, stronger and less compressible strata or over a larger depth of the foundation soil as in foundations of tall buildings. To carry horizontal loads as in bridge abutments or retaining walls and also to increase the stability of tall buildings. Inclined piles are also used to carry inclined loads with horizontal force components. To withstand uplift forces in foundations as in expensive soils and floating foundations.

7. Explain reinforced concrete wall and shear wall. Concrete would not have gained its present status as a principal building material, but for the invention of reinforced concrete, which is concrete with steel bars embedded in it. This idea resulted in a new composite material, having the potential of resisting significant tensile stresses, which was hitherto impossible. Thus, the construction of load-bearing flexural members, such as beams and slabs, became viable with this new material, effectively taking up all the tension, without separating from the concrete. And tensile stresses occur either directly, as in direct tension or flexural tension, or indirectly, as in shear, which causes tension along diagonal planes. In walls, it is the vertical elements, also made of masonry or reinforced concrete. However, it is called bearing walls if their function is to support gravity loads, and are referred to as shear walls if they are mainly required to resist lateral loads due to wind and earthquake. The thickness of reinforced concrete bearing walls varies from 123mm to 200mm; however, shear walls may be considerably thicker in the lower storeys of tall buildings. The walls around the lift cores of a building often serve as shear walls. Basically, lateral load resisting systems of reinforced concrete buildings generally consist of one of the followings: frames, shear walls and tubes. For shear walls, these are solid walls, which usually extend over the full height of the building. They are commonly located at the lift or staircases core regions. Shear walls are also frequently placed along the transverse direction of a building, either as exterior faade) walls or as in interior walls. The walls are very stiff, having considerable depth in the direction of lateral loads by bending like vertical cantilevers, fixed at the base.

The various walls and co-existing frames in a building are linked at the different floor levels by means of the floor system, which distributes the lateral loads to these different systems appropriately.

The interaction between the shear walls and the frames is structurally advantageous in that the walls restrain the frame deformations in the lower storeys, while the frames restrain the wall deformations in the upper storeys. Frame shear wall systems are generally considered in buildings up to about 40 storeys.