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INTRODUCTION
Piled-raft concept has been most notably applied to
high-rise buildings all over the world and
increasingly being recognized as an effective and
economical foundation system for high-rise
buildings, bridges and heavy industrial plants [13,
20]. Piled-raft system works through the combined
action of three bearing elements i.e. raft, piles and
subsoil [9, 11, and 19]. The basic concept of this
system is that the foundation contains only those
numbers of piles which are required to reduce the
settlements to tolerable values and improve the
bearing capacity adequately [6, 17, and 18]. This
foundation system acts most efficiently when raft
carries a significant amount of load but total
/differential settlement exceeds the permissible
values. Addition of few numbers of piles in
strategic location beneath raft reduces the
settlement besides providing additional bearing
capacity and stiffness to foundation [6]. Various
researchers studied pile-soil, pile-pile, raft-soil and
raft-pile interaction of piled-raft foundation
through analytical, numerical and laboratory model
study and proposed various design methodologies
[7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 19, and 21. Soil profile
consisting stiff clay and dense sand are favorable
situations for piled- raft due to better raft-soil
bearing interaction [18]. Soil profile consisting of
soft clay, loose sand, soft compressible and
swelling layer at relatively shallow depth will not
R. Bhowmik, M. Samanta
NUMERICAL MODELLING
Finite Element Mesh & Boundary Conditions
Raft-soil and pile-soil interaction were investigated
by carrying out three dimensional finite element
analysis using software package Plaxis 3D
Foundation. Homogenous soft clay was taken for
present study and piles in the piled-raft system
were taken as floating pile. The diameter of the
piles was taken as 0.5 m and the length as 20 m. A
square raft of width 15 m and thickness 1 m was
considered. Replacement type stone columns
between the piles in piled-raft system were
employed to improve the strength and stiffness of
the soft clay. The connection between the pile and
raft in the piled-raft system was considered as
rigid, whereas the stone columns were unconnected
to the raft. The schematic diagram of the
considered hypothetical problem is shown in
Figure 1. The pile-soil interface was considered as
slip while the raftsoil interface was considered as
smooth. The numerical domain of the model was
fixed from trial calculations, during which the
boundaries were increasingly extended till the
stresses and displacements of the piled-raft were
unaffected by further increase in the size of the
domain. From the analysis, side boundaries were
fixed at a distance of 10 B from all around the raft,
where B is the width of the raft. The bottom
boundary was set at a depth of 2L from the tip of
the piles, where L is depth of pile. Vertical
boundaries with their normal at x and z direction
were fixed. Bottom boundaries were fixed in all
directions and the ground surface was free in all
directions. Figure 2 shows the typical 3D mesh
with boundary fixities used in the analyses.
The uniformly distributed vertical load was applied
on the top of the raft surface after the initial
equilibrium was reached. The construction effects
of the piles were not considered in present analysis.
The piles were kept at stress-free state at the
beginning of the analysis [13].
Page 2 of 10
Numerical analysis of piled-raft foundation under vertical load in stone column improved soil
RAFT
CUSHION
MAT
PILES
STONE
COLUMN
R. Bhowmik, M. Samanta
Pile
Raft
Elastic
Material
30,000
500
0.1
0.2
P/V
0.2 0.01 25
20 0.3 0.65 18
45 0.3
0.4
0.6
0.5
19
0.8
-0.5
Savg/B %
Validation
The validation of finite element model in PLAXIS
was done by comparing with the load-displacement
results of piled-raft foundation published by Lee et
al. (2010). ABAQUS, a finite element based
package was used to study the three-dimensional
bearing behavior of a piled-raft on soft clay by Lee
et al. (2010). The load displacement curves of
piled-raft of floating pile group (3 x 3) of 0.5 m
pile diameter and 16 m in length and square raft of
size 10 m (thickness 1 m) was used for validation
for both slip and no-slip condition between pile and
soil. The pile head was rigidly connected to raft.
For slip condition between the pile and soil an
MohrCoulomb
-1
-1.5
-2
-2.5
MODEL-ABAQUS-NO
SLIP CONDITION
MODEL-PLAXIS-NO-SLIP
CONDITION
MODEL-ABAQUS-SLIP
CONDITION
MODEL-PLAXIS-SLIP
CONDITION
Page 4 of 10
Numerical analysis of piled-raft foundation under vertical load in stone column improved soil
m3 )
Parametric Study
A series of numerical analyses on piled-rafts (PR)
in unimproved and improved ground were
performed. The diameter of the piles was taken as
0.5 m and length as 20 m (floating). The raft was
considered as square with width 15 m and
thickness 1 m. The stone columns were arranged in
square pattern. A layer of sand cushion of 0.3m
thickness was provided between stone column and
raft for stress redistribution between soil and pile.
The soil properties used for clay, stones and sand
cushion were decided from the range of values
provided in Bowles (1998) which were further
verified from literature (Shahu et al. 2011, Ambily
et al., 2007). The values used are listed in Table 2.
The parameters and its range chosen for parametric
study are presented in Table 3. In all the studies
performed here, only long-term (drained) response
was investigated. The consolidation effects were
hence neglected and the soil parameters employed
were drained shear strength parameters. The values
of drained Youngs modulus and drained shear
strength parameters were kept constant for the total
depth of the soil layer. The properties of pile and
raft were based on a typical pile and raft made of
M25 grade of concrete. Efficacy of stone column
to improve the performance of composite piled-raft
foundation was evaluated by comparing raft-soil
and pile-soil interaction in improved and
unimproved ground. These were evaluated in
terms of bending moment and settlement of raft,
axial force distribution in pile and proportion of
load shared by piles for the range of parameters
considered in the analysis.
Table 2. Properties of Soil used
Materials
Property
Sand
Soft clay
Stone
Cushion
E
5000
55000
20000
(kPa)
0.35
0.3
0.3
43
30
10
40
bulk
(kN/
16
16.62
15.5
c
(kPa)
Rinter
20
0.9
0.932
0.58
10
15 %
15
5
Soft
clay
35 %
10
15
Unimp
Grnd
---
---
Page 5 of 10
R. Bhowmik, M. Samanta
100
% Load Shared
80
60
40
--0.6 V
20
0
0
20
40
Nos. of Piles
60
Corner
Pile
Raft
A-Line
Interior
Pile
% LOAD SHARED BY
PILES
80
60
40
20
0
0
10
20
Ar (%)
30
40
100
X/ B
M11
Numerical analysis of piled-raft foundation under vertical load in stone column improved soil
N (kN)
-400
-200
0
0.0
-0.1
-0.2
-0.3
-0.4
-0.5
-0.6
-0.7
-0.8
-0.9
-1.0
PR-4-4-CU
S
PR-4-4-Ar15
PR-4-4-Ar35
80
-400
-200
PR-4-4-CUS
PR-4-4-Ar-15
PR-4-4-Ar-35
0
0.0
-0.1
-0.2
-0.3
-0.4
-0.5
-0.6
-0.7
-0.8
-0.9
-1.0
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0
Y/L
-800
% LOAD SHARED BY
PILES
-600
Y/L
-800
15
X/B
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
-0.60
S/B(%)
10
-0.62
Ls/Ds
-0.64
-0.66
-0.68
PR-4-4-CUS
PR-4-4-L-10
PR-4-4-L-15
-0.70
-0.72
-0.74
-0.76
-0.78
Page 7 of 10
R. Bhowmik, M. Samanta
-200
0
0.0
-0.1
-0.2
-0.3
-0.4
-0.5
-0.6
-0.7
-0.8
-0.9
-1.0
PR-4-4-CUS
PR-4-4-L-5
PR-4-4-L-10
PR-4-4-L-15
N (kN)
-800
Y/ L
N (kN)
-600
-400
-900
-800
-700
-600
-500
-400
-300
-200
-100
0
Ar-0
Ar-15.45
Ar-35
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
%V
% LOAD SHARED
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0.4
0.6
%V
0.8
1.0
Page 8 of 10
Numerical analysis of piled-raft foundation under vertical load in stone column improved soil
T
Design, McGraw-Hill Inc.
3. Brinkgreve R. B. J., and Swolfs W. M. (2007).
Plaxis 3D Foundation Version 2, Reference
Manual, PLAXIS bv, Netherland.
4. Brinkgreve R. B. J., and Swolfs W. M. (2007).
Plaxis 3D Foundation Version 2, Scientific
Manual, PLAXIS bv, Netherland.
5. Brinkgreve R. B. J., and Swolfs W. M. (2007).
Plaxis 3D Foundation Version 2, Material
Models Manual, PLAXIS bv, Netherland.
6. Burland, J.B. (1995). Piles as settlement
reducers. Keynote address, 18th Italian
Congress on Soil Mechanics, Pavia, Italy.
7. Clancy, P., and Randolph M.F. (1996). Simple
design tools for piled raft foundations,
Gotechnique, 46(2) 313-328.
8. Clancy, P., and Randolph, M.F. (1993), An
approximate analysis procedure for piled raft
foundations, International Journal for
Numerical and Analytical Methods in
Geomechanics, 17, 849-869.
9. Clancy, P., and Randolph, M.F. (1993).
Analysis and Design of Piled raft
Foundations, Aust. Geomechs J. , 1, 1-21.
10. Cooke, R. W. (1986). Piled Raft Foundation
on Stiff Clays-A Contribution to Design
Philosophy, Gotechnique, 36(2), 169-203.
11. Davis, E.H., and Poulos, H.G. (1972). The
Analysis of Piled Raft Systems. Aust.
Geomechs. J., 2, 21-27.
Page 9 of 10
R. Bhowmik, M. Samanta
13. Katzenbach,