INTRODUCTION
A company is planning to carry out a construction project. This land was used to be a storage area for a
petrochemical factory. You have been engaged to consider certain geotechnical aspects of this project.
It can be noted that this is an individual task.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The project consists of the construction of:
? A concrete block walled industrial building with plan dimensions of 16 m × 40 m. The building is
to have an on-ground concrete floor slab 120 mm thick, with a finished RL of 14.0 m. The walls are
load bearing and there are some internal columns carrying the weight of the roof and other elements.
? A steel water tank having an external diameter of 14 m and an effective height of 8 m, with its base
at RL 18 m (top of the footing).
? There is an existing one-storey double brick building on the site. The RL of the slab on the ground
is 17.5 m (top of the slab).
A Site Plan is attached, showing the location of the tank, the car park (RL 17.5 m, finished surfacing)
the proposed and existing buildings. The Structural Engineer for the project has determined the proposed
building loads and they are as follows:
? Wall vertical loading: 130 kN per meter run (NOTE: the weight of foundation is included.)
? Wall moment: 60 kN m per meter run (towards inside the building)
? Each column total load (including the weight of foundation): 145 kN
In addition, 3 boreholes have been sunk at the locations shown on the Site Plan and the logs of these
boreholes are included in this brief.
REQUIRED TASKS TO BE CUNDUCTED
You are required to prepare a brief report to address the following aspects:
1. Introduction to the project
2. Complete the consistency of the soil layers based on SPT N-values.
3. Provide a cross section of the ground layers of the site based on the information given in 3 borehole
logs.
4. Provide geotechnical design aspects of the retaining structure that should be employed
between the proposed building and the water tank. This should include sufficient results to
enable the structural engineer to design the wall section, including the length of the anchor,
the anchor force and the maximum moment that can be induced in the retaining structure.
5. Design the width of the wall foundation (strip footing) and the column footings (square footings)
6. Estimate settlements of the wall and column footings. Assume the average drained Poisson’s ratio
of the soil is 0.25 and use the following formula to calculate the soils drained Young’s modulus: Es
= 800 (N+15)