Bearing capacity of piled rafts on soft clay soils

The conventional design of a piled foundation is based on a bearing capacity approach, and neglects the contribution of the raft. As a consequence, piled foundations are usually designed by overconservative criteria. With respect to the conventional approach, a more rational and economical solution could be obtained by accounting for the contribution of the raft toward the overall bearing capacity, but this potential is not exploited due to the lack of theoretical and experimental research on the behavior of piled rafts at failure. Based on both experimental evidence and three-dimensional finite element analyses, a simple criterion is proposed to evaluate the ultimate vertical load of a piled raft as a function of its component capacities, which can be simply evaluated by the conventional bearing capacity theories. The results presented in the paper thus provide a guide to assess the safety factor of a vertically loaded piled raft.