ORION 18: HOW TO DESIGN PILE FOUNDATIONS

Areas which we will design as pile, strip and raft foundations

For this tutorial, we will be modelling and designing pile cap and foundation on Orion 18. You can also check out our previous installment on modelling and designing strip foundations here, or our first foundation design where we modelled pad foundations here. Let's go.

Step 1

Open the Foundation Storey, St:00. Next click, then right click on column ‘1C16’ for the foundation. Select ‘Insert Pile Cap’.

Step 2

In the ‘PILE CAP DESIGN – Project: LearningOrion’ dialog box, under the ‘General’ tab, we will specify our pile cap dimensions. Untick the box next to ‘Calculate Automatically’. Set ‘Lx’ and ‘Ly’ to be equal to 2000mm. Click ‘Calculate’. A fourth tab titled ‘Results’ is created and opened displaying the forces encountered by the pile cap. The value of ‘Lx’ and ‘Ly’ has been changed to 2200mm as part of the design process. This change may be upwards or downwards depending on the load used for designing the pile. The settings are as displayed below.

Pile Cap Design dialog box

NB:

Orion does not carry out pile cap depth check, reinforcement design, shear or moment checks for pile caps. It only analyses the loading and selects pile cap size, pile size and number of piles. Click ‘OK’ to display the pile cap

Step 3

For other columns among the group for our pile cap design, we will design them together. Hold, ‘ctrl’ on the keyboard, then select the rest of the columns visible in the area for pile foundations. Right click and select ‘Insert Pile Cap’. In this case, the dialog box does not appear. Click ‘OK’ on the ‘Pile Base Options’ dialog box that appears to create the other pile caps.


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