Specifics of engineering design of piled raft foundations in soft soils

A method to determine distribution of the load on the raft and piles in a piled raft foundation is developed in the article. A new equation to calculate the factor to determine the share of the load transferred to the piles in case of medium compressible soils is derived. Graphs for dependencies between the ratio of settlements in a piled raft foundation to settlements in a raft foundation and the share of the load on piles are plotted. The dependencies obtained better correlate with the experimental data and make it possible to distribute loads between the raft and the piles optimally. This will allow designing foundations, efficiently using monolithic behavior of the raft and piles, which will improve the reliability and operational integrity of buildings, reduce settlements and decrease the number of piles, reducing, in its turn, the cost and material consumption of the foundation.