Explore the vast range of titles available.

Current design assumptions for precast, prestressed concrete piles embedded in cast-in-place (CIP) pile caps or footings vary across states, leading to inconsistencies in engineering practices. Previous studies suggest that short embedment lengths (0.5 to 1.0 times the pile diameter) can develop approximately 60% of the bending capacity of the pile, with full fixity potentially achieved at shorter embedment lengths than current design specifications due to confinement stresses. This study experimentally evaluates 10 full-scale pile-to-cap connection specimens with varying embedment lengths, aiming to investigate the required development length for full bending capacity. The findings demonstrate that full bending capacity can be achieved at the pile-to-pile cap connection with shallower embedment than code provisions, challenging existing design standards and highlighting the need for more accurate guidelines for bridge foundation design. Keywords: pile embedment length; pile-to-cap connections; precast, prestressed concrete pile.

The construction industry is a significant contributor to global carbon emissions, particularly raft foundations which are a major source of stored carbon. This research investigates methods to optimize raft foundation design to reduce carbon footprint. This study quantifies the impact of design and material selection on carbon emissions by exploring the changes in raft foundation design and concrete quality. The results indicated that higher concrete grades and increased foundation thickness led to a significant increase in embodied carbon. This is due to the increased use of cement and reinforcing steel, which have high carbon factors. Parametric design techniques, including the optimization of reinforcement spacing and material usage, can reduce carbon emissions. These findings highlight the importance of efficient design for achieving sustainable construction practices while maintaining structural integrity.

This paper describes an approach for utilizing in-situ measurements of shear wave velocity Vs to carry out preliminary and check design calculations for shallow and deep foundations. For estimates of foundation movements, Vs can be used directly to estimate the small-strain stiffness of the soil or rock strata, while for ultimate capacity calculations, use is made of empirical correlations between Vs and penetration resistance measures, which in turn are correlated to the foundation resistance characteristics. The approach is applied to a series of published tests on shallow footings, and on a series of pile load tests for a very tall building. For these cases, comparisons of the calculated with the measured load—settlement behaviour indicates that the suggested approach provides a reasonable, albeit somewhat conservative, level of agreement.

Design of foundations on an elastic base is carried out using the solution of three-dimensional problems of contact interaction. Improving the accuracy of engineering calculations is necessary to ensure economic efficiency and increase energy savings in green building. The problems of indentation of punches with a flat base bounded by doubly connected close to polygonal contact areas are researched in the present work. Small parameter method is used to obtain explicit analytical expressions for the contact pressure distribution and the punch displacement dependence in a simplified form, which is convenient for engineering practice. The found load-displacement dependence satisfies the known inequalities that are valid for an arbitrary contact domain. Also a numerical-analytical method is in consideration. It uses the simple layer potential expansion and successive approximations for the problems accounting roughness of the elastic half-space. Roughness coefficient is considered as a parameter of regularization of the integral equation for the smooth contact problem. The results of both methods coincide with sufficient accuracy.

This preliminary study introduces and evaluates a router-based multi-agent framework for automated foundation design calculations through intelligent task classification and expert selection. Three configurations were assessed: single-agent processing, multi-agent designer-checker architecture, and router-based expert selection, using baseline models including DeepSeek R1, ChatGPT 4 Turbo, Grok 3, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Initial evaluation on 27 test cases with triple-trial execution shows promising performance: the router-based system achieved 95.00% for shallow foundations and 90.63% for pile design, representing improvements of 8.75 and 3.13 percentage points over standalone Grok 3, respectively, and outperforming conventional workflows by 10.0–43.75 percentage points. Grok 3 demonstrated superior standalone performance, indicating enhanced large language model (LLM) mathematical reasoning capabilities. The dual-tier classification framework successfully distinguished foundation types, enabling appropriate analytical approaches. While these preliminary results suggest router-based multi-agent systems as a promising approach for foundation design automation, the limited sample size necessitates comprehensive validation on larger, more diverse datasets before deployment recommendations. Safety–critical requirements necessitate continued human oversight in professional applications. This work provides a methodological foundation for future research in AI-assisted geotechnical engineering.

Natural hazards such as landslides and flooding, can significantly affect the performance of foundations for structures. Therefore, risk assessment is important for shallow foundations analysis to ensure the stability and safety of a structure. In geotechnical design, the assessment of risk involves modelling the variability and uncertainty of soil properties, which may significantly affect the behaviour of the foundations. By integrating the risks from natural hazards into the foundation design, engineers can develop more resilient and reliable structures. In conventional geotechnical design, a deterministic solution leads to a single factor of safety and so does not represent possible variations of soil properties. However, a risk assessment analysis provides a more meaningful result in terms of a probability of failure and a reliability index. It can provide a valuable tool for modelling soil heterogeneity and uncertainties due to natural hazards and therefore contributing for a more sustainable design. The current work focuses on the behaviour of shallow foundations on clays and investigates the performance of the foundation by applying the three different design approaches, as proposed by Eurocode 7, in terms of a risk and reliability analysis. The undrained shear strength will be introduced in the form of a random field variable and multiple Monte Carlo simulations will be performed. The results will be presented and compared using a reliability index to examine the effect of soil variability among the different design practices of Eurocode 7.

Gypseous soils are widely found in arid regions and are known for their high collapsibility when exposed to water. This study investigates the effect of water level inundation on Negative Skin Friction (NSF) and settlement in deep foundations in gypseous soil containing 50% gypsum content. The tests have five water levels starting from 0% up to 100% level of inundation, while being under a constant load of 70 kPa. NSF peaked at 50% saturation due to soil collapse and densification of surrounding soil, while settlement increased and reached its maximum at full saturation. This demonstrates that the nonlinear relationship between water level and pile and soil interaction highlights the need to consider partial saturation in foundation design in gypseous soil.

The stability of pile foundation is influenced by many interacting factors, particularly geological conditions. Quantifying the impact of physical and mechanical soil properties on pile stability is critical for achieving optimal design outcomes. This study investigates the sensitivity of key soil parameters and validates the findings with a case study of a university building in Kashkar, Xinjiang, China. A three-dimensional pile–soil model was developed in Abaqus and calibrated with static load test data. Variable control and orthogonal experiments were conducted to examine settlement patterns and ultimate bearing capacity under varying soil parameters. Settlement and ultimate bearing capacity were adopted as stability indicators. Sensitivity analysis was performed through multi-factor variance analysis, sensitivity analysis of factors (SAF), and variance inflation factor (VIF) collinearity analysis. The results show that the most influential parameters are the friction coefficient of the soil above the pile tip, the Poisson’s ratio of the pile-end soil, the Poisson’s ratio of the soil above the pile tip, the friction coefficient of the pile-end soil, and the elastic modulus of the pile-end soil. These findings provide a quantitative basis for optimizing design parameters and improving the efficiency and reliability of pile foundation design in sandy soil regions.

Seismic failure of structures supported on pile foundation has revealed the importance of seismic soil-foundation-structure interaction (SSFSI) for ensuring safe design. The uncertainties in subsoil properties and seismic loading may lead the problem to be more redundant. In this context, the present study attempts to assess the seismic reliability of pile foundation-supported building structure embedded in inhomogeneous clay layer considering inertial interaction. Shear strength of clay and earthquake loading is considered as spatially variable uncertain parameters. A non-linear soil-pile-structure system was assumed, and Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) was adopted to obtain probabilistic response of the system. First-order reliability method (FORM) is used for reliability assessment. The study indicates significant influence of uncertain parameters on the seismic response of building structure. Further, the influence of material and load uncertainty parameters on the probabilistic seismic response of structure designed following older version of code is higher than counterpart structure designed following recent version. FORM based reliability analysis infers thatserviceability criterion may be the governing parameter for pile foundation design. Moreover, the study also indicates that the curvature ductility demand of pile may be considered another crucial design parameter to assess the reliability of pile foundation.

An evaluation of the impact of aerodynamic interactions on offshore wind turbine (OWT) monopile design in large wind farms is presented. The interactions between turbines within a wind farm, and between the atmosphere and the entire wind-farm, act to reduce the mean effective loads across the farm. This reduction impacts the operational performance of OWT foundations in two notable ways: a decrease in turbine structural loads which affects design to serviceability limit state and a shift in excitation frequencies of the passing blades which impacts fatigue performance. To assess the implications on monopile design, we conduct static and dynamic analyses using a 1-D finite element model (FEM). We show that the farmatmosphere interaction effect leads to marked reduction in monopile lengths between ∼ 5 − 25% across an entire wind farm. The dynamic analysis reveals a competing balance between shifting frequency bands and reduced wind loads on the fatigue response. The monopile design is found to be strongly dependent on wind farm size and ratio of wind to wave loading, with wave loading coupled to the farm-atmosphere interaction effect. Exploiting these interactions plays a pivotal role in reducing the levelised cost of wind energy and ensuring robust design of OWTs.