BigH,
I've been pretty impressed by the Eng-Tips forum ever since I recently joined it -- an excellent learning environment. Geotechnical engineering is all about problems and that is what makes it both so challenging and rewarding. I haven't had much of a chance to peruse the "Foundations...
Valuable comment, JAE. Clearly this is an area of significant concern to the geotechnical community, judging by the range of insightful comments above.
Along these lines, one of my favourite quotes is "You pay for a site investigation whether you have one or not" (Institution of Civil...
SteveBraune: don't put yourself down. Your "dumb structural guy" thoughts agree completely with elasticity theory. Wish that we could all be so dumb. Elasticity theory says that a rigid foundation will have infinite stresses at its edges. We all know that isn't going to really happen, but the...
BigH, do those pancakes come with maple syrup??? If so, I could eat a good deal more than 3!!
You and VAD have clearly identified many of the problems with developing a half-decent geotechnical design code.
BigH:
The weaker zone should indeed form the basis of design. My point re the...
I have three comments relating to BigH and Ashjun's comments;
1) as BigH indicates, settlement does usually govern the design of a shallow foundation and the various settlement calculation methods do often lead to quite different results (unfortunately).
In addition, LRFD provisions haven't...
Sorry this reply is 9 months late, I just joined today.
The Canadian (Ontario) Highway Bridge Design Code, whose foundation provisions are based in large part on Meyerhof's excellent work, is currently calibrated from older ASD codes (as specified also by Meyerhof and others). What this means...
