When soil conditions require deep foundations for building construction, the current practice for designing foundation structures relies on two approaches, the use of individual piles or the use of piles as a group. In the case of individual piles, they are dimensioned until the stability potential of pile and the required stability of foundation are equalized. In the case of group of piles, the sum of individual stability potential of each pile needs to be equal to the required stability of the building foundation. Nowadays, the second approach, also known as piling, prevails and becomes a starting point of any stability analysis, without considering single pile stability, which is an independent system. This implies that there is no summing of individual potential stabilities for a group of piles.
In this work, we provide evidence that the group of piles can be more than a sum of each pile, if they are positioned in a specific manner according to a statically rational sense. In such system, mutual interactions of individual piles yield new beneficial properties and altogether act as a one stability unit, i.e. a foundation structure. Using computational and practical testing of our hypothesis, we demonstrated that foundation construction composed of a specific group of piles displays improved stability than the sum of single piles. When such foundation structure are used for dimensioning of foundations, computational stability ambiguities are avoided. Moreover, we do not secure our calculations with high factors of safety as we have to do with current approaches. Our innovative foundation structure provides solution for any case of foundation with the significant reduction in pile size, contributing to preservation of the environment and reducing the cost of work.

foundation, piling, bearing capacity, settlement