Building Foundations and Settlement - Principles and Practice, Short Course Programme

Those involved in the design of building developments need to understand how the above ground structure will interact with and affect the ground. This requires a sound understanding of how soils behave in principle and how to model that behaviour mathematically. The aim of this course is to therefore develop your ability in the design of building foundations and the prediction of settlements.

It will start from a review of how foundations fail and the fundamental basis of the analysis of engineering issues, and progress to design and the use of design codes. The importance of the interrelationship of the loads applied, the ground response and the soil – structure interaction will be stressed. The course will be taught via a series of lectures followed by tutorial questions with case studies to illustrate the material. You will be encouraged to undertake some additional guided study after the course to further reinforce their learning. The indicative content comprises the following:

• Types of foundation
• Failure modes for shallow foundations and piles
• Brief reprise of the relevant soil mechanics principles
• Shear failure and bearing capacity theory
• Stress distribution
• Types of settlement and their occurrence
• Estimation of settlement under shallow foundations
• Design codes
• Shallow foundation design examples
• Principles of pile foundation design
• Consideration of soil - structure interaction

The intended audiences for this course are architects and developers wanting to develop their appreciation of foundations and settlement, graduate civil and structural engineers wanting to develop their understanding and skills, engineering geologists with some design experience wanting to develop or refresh their understanding, and geotechnical engineers early in their careers wanting to build their knowledge.

At the end of this course you should have:

• refreshed your understanding of the different types of foundation and their modes of failure, using case studies
• refreshed your understanding of basic soil mechanics principles relevant to soil strength and compressibility
• developed your knowledge and understanding of bearing capacity theory
• developed your knowledge and understanding of the components of settlement and their prediction
• reviewed the principles of the design codes
• applied your knowledge and understanding to the design of foundations in a range of soil types, accounting for the inter-relation between load and settlement.

If you have any questions you can contact us by:

Email
Telephone: +44 (0)115 848 2813

There is currently no module information available for this course.