Rocscience | Pile Capacity Table Generator - A new feature in RSPile Featured

RSPile, our FEM Pile Analysis program is one of the most comprehensive Pile Analysis software in the industry today. The program is designed to handle analyses that include Axially Loaded Piles, Laterally Loaded Piles, Grouped Piles, Driven Piles, and Bored Piles.

Pile Capacity Generator Table

To further the capabilities of the program as part of our continuous software development model, we have recently added the Pile Capacity Table Generator, which gives you an option to generate a table for proposed Bored piles capacity with depth. This kind of table is widely used by site investigation and geotechnical firms to prepare a ready guide for the structural engineers to choose their piles' distribution in their preliminary analysis of the superstructure and the foundations.

Usually, at the beginning of a project, it is difficult to know exactly how much load will be transferred to the piles and how many load combinations and load cases are present. A preliminary estimate for the allowable capacity of several proposed piles will be very useful to start the analysis. After the first run of the structural analysis program (ETABS, SAFE, Ansys, STAAD Pro, etc.), the loads on the piles are found usually assuming them as hinges or fixities at the foundation retaining supports. With these loads, the first estimate of pile sizes and lengths may be chosen from such a table to start a further investigation and runs for the program with new supports that represent the piles as springs (whether linear or non-linear) to optimize the choice of the piles.

The pile capacity table generator not only provides you with the ultimate skin friction and ultimate tip resistance but also includes the tool that allows you to apply different factors of safety to determine the allowable carrying capacity of the piles as per your convenience. Graphical representation of the variation of ultimate and allowable capacities with depth helps the designer to visualize where the changes are potential and to choose suitable depths to end the piles at. You can choose to limit or free the average sectional stress.

The pile capacity table generator allows you to divide the project area into sub-areas or Zones that will be defined for pile capacity calculations differently with each zone having its own soil layering and ground surface based on interpolating between the boreholes. A unified cut-off level may be assigned for each zone and you can view the project zoning in 2D layout and 3D view. Pile designers and geotechnical investigation firms will be able to optimize the project zones for cost minimization and adopt elevations closer to foundation levels.

With the Pile Capacity Generator Table, we aim to ease the everyday life of practicing engineers and we will continue to add further results in the upcoming releases to ensure this capacity table is your bible for piles choice.

Tutorial

To try your hand at analyzing various bored pile types across different zones of the site and generate capacity tables and graphs in RSPile, follow our Pile Capacity Table Generator Tutorial.

How can I try out the Pile Capacity Generator Table?

If you are a RSPile user with an active Maintenance+ subscription, you will be able to use this feature if you have installed the latest update. You can also get a free trial license of RSPile to try this new feature.