Foundation Design
Laying the Groundwork for Your Building’s Foundation Design
Before you begin to appreciate the colossal superstructure of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, think of where each iconic architectural landmark started. Design has always been the starting point, and putting a spin on its constructive transformation entails an excellent foundation design for your project. Aesthetics and function won’t be brought to life if not for a virtual constructability review of your building’s structural aspect. To begin with, our engineers lay out all the foundation you need to build a strong substructure design for your project.
Specifying which foundation type you will utilize for your building project depends on a lot of structural design considerations. This can range from the bearing capacity of the soil, weight of the superstructure, soil type, groundwater table, frost depth, structural loads, environmental loads, site location, foundation material and all other factors which may affect how our civil engineers optimize your foundation design.
But first, you need to understand the working principle behind the foundation design, for which we have two types namely:
- Shallow foundations
Usually three meters below the ground or as per specifications of our expert civil engineers, shallow foundations can range from raft or mat foundation, to different types of footing such as isolated, cantilever or combined. Here’s where you can utilize shallow foundations for your project: typical residential or commercial construction that are small to mid-scale in size. On the technical side, shallow foundations can be disadvantageous for lightweight structures due to possibilities of settlement.
- Deep foundations
Take your foundation design to the next level with deep foundations. After shallow foundations, you can safely anchor your superstructure to a deep foundation system such as pier, caisson or pile driving. Despite its higher construction costs in comparison with shallow foundation, deep foundations offer your near-shore areas or marine-based buildings an unmatched structural anchorage deep down the earth’s bedrock.
Knowing these foundation types can get you a headstart, but we are only scratching the surface here when it comes to the enormous complexity of foundation design. Hence, you need New York Engineers for in-depth civil engineering expertise on the most critical baseline point in your building project.
Testing Soil Samples for Geotechnical Investigations in Foundation Design
As you go deep down the hierarchy of constructing a feasible foundation design, your first order of business should be to conduct a comprehensive geotechnical investigation. In simple words, soil testing and analysis serve as your first and foremost critical path item. Without soil sampling, you miss a critical turning point in your entire building project by allowing structural hazards to take place.
As experienced structural engineers, we can’t emphasize enough how important geotechnical investigation is for your building project. Most building clients or first-time homeowners would undermine the importance of soil sampling for cost-saving measures, but realizing later on that this could be very costly in terms of structural repairs and retrofitting down the line.
In worst-case scenarios, designing your foundation without considering soil investigations can even lead to your building collapse, imposing liabilities on your part by endangering the lives of building occupants.
This is why our expert civil engineers show you how you can implement proactive measures for your foundation design through soil sampling methods, such as:
- Inspection
- Test pits
- Probing
- Boring
For starters, inspection paves the way for ocular assessment, giving you an overview of what site conditions you can expect along with the adjacent structures. Afterwards, you can dig or excavate test pits for soil sample collection, and gain better data acquisition on the underlying soil through probing. For a more detailed technical soil analysis, you can delve deeper by boring holes into the ground so you can get information on the soil and rock strata, engineering properties of soil, and groundwater location.
Don’t be misled into thinking that you have the same geotechnical results as your adjacent structures, since each soil climate differs from one another despite the same vicinity. At New York Engineers, we treat each building project with a unique-specific approach on foundation design.
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Secure Structural Integrity with Reinforced Concrete Foundation Design
If there's another material that can partner up with concrete, then steel comes first. Combine the two, and you have high compression from concrete and tensile strength from steel—neutralizing the load extremes on a right amount of equilibrium in what we call reinforced concrete.
To illustrate the principle of reinforced concrete on your foundation design, name footings, structural columns and grade beams. All these and more make up the shallow foundation design for your mid-scale residential and commercial facilities, spanning just three meters below the subsurface level or as per structural engineer's depth specifications.
Below are the factors you should consider when you deploy reinforced concrete foundation design as your core structural point:
- Reinforced concrete footings perform equal load distribution from superstructure down to the ground, and types can range from isolated to cantilever or combined footings
- Improper excavation for footing trenches can decrease the density of the soil, resulting in less bearing capacity
- Soil replacement for trenches that are dug too deep expand as much as 50%, then cause settling once reconsolidated under load
- International codes list different bearing capacities for each specific type of soil, where fine soils such as clays and silts have limited capacities than coarse soils
- Soil that is in direct contact underneath the footing takes the highest concentrated load and decreases consequently as it moves further away due to direct proportional relationship of distance and pressure
- Gravel or crushed stone delivers maximum shear resistance, subsurface water drainage and non-expansion from high moisture levels when utilized as a base for foundation design
Steel and concrete are a powerful duo, and New York Engineers stack up the intrinsic performance of these materials against demanding soil requirements for the structural integrity of your foundation design.
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