Designing Foundations

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Tips & Tricks

000566 24 May 2013 Tips & Tricks Concrete Structures RF-CONCRETE CONCRETE RF-/FOUNDATION Pro Paul Kieloch Design

In RFEM 5 and RSTAB 8, you can design foundations according to EN 1992‑1‑1 and EN 1997‑1 in the RF‑/FOUNDATION Pro add‑on module.

The following types of foundations are available:

Bucket foundation with smooth bucket sides
Bucket foundation with rough bucket sides
Foundation plate
Block foundation with rough sides

In practice, these types of foundations cover a great number of design purposes.

It can, however, happen that you need other foundations with forms deviating from the options provided in RF‑/FOUNDATION Pro. For such special design purposes, RFEM and the available add‑on modules allow you to carry out a viable and economical design. Here, this is shown by an example of a foundation which is not covered by the types of foundations available in RF‑/FOUNDATION Pro.

Consider the following exemplary situation: We want to design a foundation for a lattice tower structure. The corner posts of the tower are applied to four bases that protrude from a concrete slab. The loads are specified manually by support forces from the design of the lattice tower structure. The individual load combinations can be generated either by RFEM or manually.

For the design of the foundation plate, we use RF‑CONCRETE Surfaces for the bending design and the crack width check. The rising bases can be designed with RF‑CONCRETE Members. The punching shear design of the individual bases on the plate is carried out with the RF‑PUNCH module. The geotechnical checks can be performed manually via the output of the existing bearing pressure. With the RF‑SOILIN module, you can enter the soil parameters from a soil investigation report to determine the foundation coefficients and consider them in the RFEM calculation.

The graphic shows the rendering of the modeled foundation plate with the resign structural components and the results values for the bottom layer of the bending reinforcement.