Consolidation of Rigid Raft

by the Program Quick ELPLA

Settlements of rafts may be calculated using either flexibility or stress coefficients-technique. Analyzing rafts on elastic soil layers may be carried out using the first technique, while that on consolidated soil should be carried out by the second one to get realistic results. In this case, compression index C_c of the soil is used to define the consolidation characteristics of the clay deposits. The problem is that there are no enough available formulations of stress coefficients for such type of analysis. In this book, numerical and semi-analytical procedures are developed to determine the magnitude of consolidation settlement under the common regular shapes of rigid rafts on a deeply extended clay layer using stress coefficients-technique.

The book describes the essential equations used in Quick ELPLA to obtain the final consolidation settlement and contact pressure of a rigid raft with some verification examples. The problems of consolidation settlement of rigid raft outlined in this book can be also analyzed by the program ELPLA and the same results can be obtained. Quick ELPLA is a simple user interface program and needs little information to define a problem. It is prefer to use it for a simple foundation geometry. Furthermore, ELPLA can also read data files of a rigid consolidation problem defined by Quick ELPLA. User can analyze the problem again by ELPLA.

Although the numerical procedure outlined here is valid for rigid rafts of any arbitrary shape, but only the two special cases of rigid rafts, rectangular and circular rigid rafts, are taken into consideration.