Combined Pile Raft Foundations: Theory & Hand Calculations

Modern infrastructure projects such as high-rise buildings, bridges, industrial plants often impose very heavy loads on the supported soil. To overcome the limitations of conventional raft and pile foundations, design engineers increasingly adopt the Combined Pile Raft Foundation (CPRF) system, wherein both the raft and piles work together in sharing the structural loads improving the foundation performance resulting in a more economical and efficient foundation design.

This comprehensive course on CPRF intended for practicing civil, structural and geotechnical engineers; graduate, post graduate students and researchers provide an extensive coverage on the CPRF concepts such as component interactions, design situations, design philosophies, analysis methods including detailed hand calculations using simplified methods. By the end of this course, you will learn the basic concepts of CPRF, interactions between various components namely soil, pile and raft design situations where they are feasible, their analysis methods and how to prepare detailed hand calculations to arrive at approximate number of piles to satisfy both the settlement and capacity requirements. The course will equip the students and engineers with sufficient skills to prepare an adequate CPRF layout based on hand calculations for a detailed analysis using FEM/BEM based computer programs and more importantly properly verify and interpret the CPRF analysis results.