Location
New York, New York
Date
14 Apr 2004, 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Abstract
A soft soil site, located near Vancouver, BC, presented a unique challenge for the Owner and geotechnical engineer. The relatively narrow but long site was covered by a variable thickness of silty sand and gravel fill overlying about 3 m of peat, organic silt to 12 m depth and very soft, sensitive clay to about 35 m depth. A three/two-story, 27 by 200 m, concrete tilt-up warehouse type structure was proposed for the site. The two foundation options initially considered included the full structure and slab supported on piles driven down to refusal at about 40m depth or conventional spread foundations after preloading the site with up to 6 m of fill for at least one year. An alternative and chosen design was to use a thick mat of Lightweight Cellular Concrete (LCC) to offset building and fill loads as well as to provide a method of redistributing foundation stresses to reduce potentially adverse differential movements. Because of a history of variable fill thicknesses placed over the property, with resulting variable magnitude of preconsolidation of the soft soils, it was necessary to design a variable thickness for the LCC along the length of the building and provide a nominal preload for three months prior to building construction. The project was completed on budget and has performed as predicted over the past four years since construction. This paper presents the results of settlement monitoring of the preload and warehouse, and provides a summary of building performance.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
5th Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
University of Missouri--Rolla
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 2004 University of Missouri--Rolla, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Robinson, Keith E., "Unique Foundation Solution for Organic Soil Site" (2004). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 54.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/5icchge/session01/54
Unique Foundation Solution for Organic Soil Site
New York, New York
A soft soil site, located near Vancouver, BC, presented a unique challenge for the Owner and geotechnical engineer. The relatively narrow but long site was covered by a variable thickness of silty sand and gravel fill overlying about 3 m of peat, organic silt to 12 m depth and very soft, sensitive clay to about 35 m depth. A three/two-story, 27 by 200 m, concrete tilt-up warehouse type structure was proposed for the site. The two foundation options initially considered included the full structure and slab supported on piles driven down to refusal at about 40m depth or conventional spread foundations after preloading the site with up to 6 m of fill for at least one year. An alternative and chosen design was to use a thick mat of Lightweight Cellular Concrete (LCC) to offset building and fill loads as well as to provide a method of redistributing foundation stresses to reduce potentially adverse differential movements. Because of a history of variable fill thicknesses placed over the property, with resulting variable magnitude of preconsolidation of the soft soils, it was necessary to design a variable thickness for the LCC along the length of the building and provide a nominal preload for three months prior to building construction. The project was completed on budget and has performed as predicted over the past four years since construction. This paper presents the results of settlement monitoring of the preload and warehouse, and provides a summary of building performance.
