Influence of Density of Soil and Length of Pile for an Effective Pile- Rafted Foundation System Loaded Vertically – A Numerical Validation of Abhirami B et.al.

Abstract

Soil act as a load transferring medium to carry the approaching loads from the structure lying on it and transfer it to the bearing medium like rocks. The interaction of soil with the structure is of prime importance to identify the causes of structural failures. The foundation plays a major role in this structural weight transfer mechanism. Pile rafted foundations are generally preferred where only raft system is not sufficient to satisfy the design requirements. These are a combination of conventional pile foundation along with raft placed on the top of it. The pile in this composite foundation system act as a settlement reducer, where as the raft is responsible to carry and transfer the mass approaching it. Variation of different parameters of this composite system results in effective solution for the soils facing heavy differential settlements due to its low bearing capacity. This paper presents the numerical validation of Abirami B et.al. using Plaxis 3D FEM software on their experimental studies of parametric changes on vertically loaded pile raft foundation. The analysis was carried out with Mohr coulomb constitutive model with a constant raft dimension and varying pile length. The load settlement curve has been arrived from the numerical analysis and is compared with the experimentally obtained results. The numerical results agree with the experimental values concluding that this validation may be utilized to analyse the effect of the foundation system when different parameters of piles and raft varied.