RECENT DEVELOPMENT IN SIMPLIFIED DEFORMATION ANALYSIS PROGRAM PRAB FOR PILED RAFT FOUNDATIONS

This paper presents a simplified approach for the deformation analysis of piled raft foundations using a hybrid model in which the flexible raft is modeled as a thin plate and the piles as elastic beams and the soil is treated as springs. This simplified method has been implemented in a computer program PRAB. PRAB is extended to take into account the influence of a finite soil depth in this research. Good agreement between the resuits calculated using PRAB and three-dimensional FEM are obtained for the analysis of a piled raft and a pile group epile and mbedded in a homogeneous finite depth soil. From the analysis results, it is shown that deformation of a forces along a pile in the piled raft are smaller than those in the pile group. Although the emphasis of this paper is on linear elastic response, PRAB can easily be extended to include non-linear response.