Load Sharing mechanism of Piled-Raft-Foundations

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In practice, deep foundations are made of a set of piles connected together with a concrete raft.*The role of the raft is to transfer the column load to the piles uniformly. It does not however*share the building load with the piles. While engineers often design raft foundation alone to carry*the entire building load. Accordingly the design of pile foundations is regarded as highly*conservative, in fact uneconomical.*The concept of Piled-Raft-Foundation has been increasingly receiving recognition around the*world. While engineers recognize the contribution of the raft to the foundation loads, research in*this field has been lagging to estimate the raft share. This is due to the fact that interaction among*the piles/soil/raft is complex in nature and field testing is difficult at best.*In the literature, several reports can be found dealing with the load-settlement relationship of*piled-raft foundations. Nevertheless, these reports are based on limited modeling, and failed to*recognize the effect of some vital governing parameters and the three-dimensional stressdeformation*mechanism, which take place within the piled-raft foundation.*In this proposal; experimental and numerical investigations on piles-raft foundation will be*performed. A three-dimensional numerical model will be developed to simulate the case of piled-raft*foundation and laboratory tests will be conducted on prototype experimental set-up. After*validating the numerical model with the experimental results and the data available in the*literature, the model will be used examine the parameters, believed to govern the performance of*this foundation.*The results of this study will have significant economic impact on the construction of piled-raft*foundations for high-rise buildings without compromising on the safety. It is expecting that the*design theories, guidelines and recommendations developed will be incorporated in the Canadian*Foundation Engineering manual and American Society of Civil Engineers manual of practice. *It is equally important to take note that this project will provide training to the Highly Qualified Personnel and scientists.