Basics of Foundation Design
The “Red Book” presents a background to conventional foundation analysis and design. The text started as acompendium of the contents of courses in foundation design I gave during my years as Professor at the University of Ottawa, Department of Civil Engineering.
The text is not intended to replace the much more comprehensive ‘standard’ textbooks, but rather to support and augment these in a few important areas, supplying methods applicable to practical cases handled daily by practicing engineers and providing the basic soil mechanics background to those methods.
It concentrates on the static design of foundations. Although the topic is far from exhaustively treated, it does intend to present most of the basic material needed for a practicing engineer involved in routine geotechnical design, as well as provide the tools for an engineering student to approach and solve common geotechnical design problems.
Indeed, I make the somewhat brazen claim that the text actually goes a good deal beyond what the average geotechnical engineers usually deals with in the course of an ordinary design practice. However, the "Red Book" is not intended to replace conventional text books, but to supplement them. Therefore, many already well-covered areas in conventional text books are not addressed in the "Red Book".
The text emphasizes two main aspects of geotechnical analysis, the use of effective stress analysis and the understanding that the distribution of pore pressures in the field is fundamental to the relevance of any foundation design. Indeed, foundation design requires a solid understanding of the, in principle simple, but in reality very complex, interaction of solid particles with the water and gas present in the pores, that is an in-depth recognition of the most basic tenet in soil mechanics, the principium of effective stress.
To avoid the easily introduced errors of using buoyant unit weight, I strongly advise to use the straight-forward method of calculating the effective stress from determining separately the total stress and pore pressure distributions,finding the effective stress distribution quite simply as a subtraction between the two. The method is useful for the student and the practicing engineer alike.
