Tall Building Foundation Design by Harry G. Poulos

Professor Harry G. Poulos AM FAA FTSE NAE DScEng is a Senior Principal with the geotechnical consulting company of Coffey Geotechnics in Sydney Australia, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney.

He has been involved in a large number of major projects in Australia and overseas including the Egnatia Odos highway project in Greece, the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, and the Dubai tower in Doha, Qatar.

He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1988 and a Fellow of The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 1996.

He has received a number of awards and prizes, including the Kevin Nash Gold Medal of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering in 2005.

He was the Rankine Lecturer in 1989 and the Terzaghi Lecturer in 2004 and was selected as the Australian Civil Engineer of the Year for 2003 by the Institution of Engineers Australia.

In 1993, he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for his services to engineering, and in 2010, he was elected a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers In 2014, he was elected as a Foreign Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Tall Building Foundation Design Contents

• Introduction
• Characteristics of tall buildings
• Selection of foundation type
• The foundation design process
• Building loads
• Ground characterization
• Design for ultimate limit state
• Design for serviceability limit state loadings
• Design for ground movements
• Design for dynamic loadings
• Design for seismic events
• Design of basement walls and excavations
• Pile load testing
• Performance monitoring and control
• Case histories

Preface to Tall Building Foundation Design PDF

I have been involved in the design of tall building foundations for almost three decades, during which time building height records have been broken several times.

The demands on foundation design for these buildings have increased accordingly, and have resulted in significant changes in design practice. State-of-the-art techniques are now becoming routine and the amount and quality of geotechnical data being acquired for the design process have also improved substantially.

As I advance well into my eighth decade, I felt that it might be useful to set out an approach to tall-building foundation design that my consulting and academic colleagues and I have developed and employed on many projects.

The approach that is described in this book employs a three-stage process, starting with a preliminary or concept design phase, followed by a detailed phase and then a final phase in which all aspects are checked, the construction drawings are finalized and the design is ready for implementation.

The level of computational sophistication and the amount of geotechnical data available will generally increase as each phase proceeds, often starting with a relatively sparse amount of data, and then increasing in detail and quantity as the design process proceeds.

This second phase would normally consist of detailed drilling, geophysics, and in situ and laboratory testing. The final phase would incorporate filed element testing, usually on piles and perhaps shallow foundations, to enable optimization and final “tuning” of the design.

The objectives of this book are as follows:

1. To clarify the issues that need to be considered in the design, not only from the structural loadings but also from loadings that arise from the ground in which the foundations are located.

2. To summarise some of the available information on geotechnical design techniques, for each of the three phases of design.

These techniques range from empirical approaches that can be used as a first rough estimate of design requirement, through simplified but sound methods that may be employed for the detailed design, to detailed numerical analyses suitable for the final stages of the design process.

3. To set out methods by which the relevant foundation design parameters can be assessed.

4. To discuss procedures for pile testing and monitoring the foundation’s performance during and after construction.

5. To present some details of a limited number of case histories in which the various analysis and design techniques described in this book have been applied.

These case histories are limited to those in which I have been involved, but other publications discuss many more case histories, for example, Hemsley (2000) and Katzenbach et al. (2016).

While this book focusses on the geotechnical design of foundations, there are brief sections on other aspects of tall building design that the geotechnical designer should be familiar with.

These include the various structural forms of tall buildings, the options available for the foundation system, the various sources of load on the foundations, and some very basic aspects of the structural design of the foundation system.

Because of the diverse sources of information contained in this book, no attempt has been made to unify the notation. Rather, the notation of the original source has generally been retained, with some minor departures.

As a consequence, there are many over-worked symbols whose meaning is very much dictated by the context in which they appear. Accordingly, the definition of such symbols as α, β, a, b, c, d, D, e, L, k, K, P, p, R, u and V, among many others, must be examined carefully before use.

The field of geotechnical engineering and its sub-field, foundation design, continues to develop and progress and so some of the material in this book may become dated in time.

However, the general principles set out in this book are philosophically rather basic, and it is hoped that they will stand the test of time more durably than some of the empirical and simplified calculation methods.

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Author(s): Harry G. Poulos

Publisher: CRC Press, Year: 2017

ISBN: 9781498796088

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