Piled Raft Design Strategies for High Rise Buildings

Piled rafts have been widely adopted as an effective foundation for designing high-rise buildings because of their efficiency in controlling the total and differential settlements and improving bearing capacity. In many cases the piled rafts settlements are likely to be large, which leads to an increase of the pile length and/or number of piles required to reduce the settlements. However, this increase does not satisfy the design requirements or an economical design. The majority of piled raft foundations has been designed with a uniform pile length and configuration. This paper describes the process of optimizing the design of a piled raft foundation for a high rise building in the Mazandaran province in Iran by considering an economical design methodology in which piles are placed more densely beneath the maximum load positions when the piled raft is subjected to non-uniform loads. By using the ELPLA software in the analysis process, the validity of the software is examined through the results of a report prepared on behalf of Technical Committee TC18 on piled foundations. The study shows that the pile arrangement method can help to considerably reduce the total and differential settlements with similar total pile length as well as the induced bending moments and shear forces of the raft. This study can help practicing engineers to choose pile and raft parameters with the pile arrangement method to produce an economical design.