Avaliação teórica, numérica e probabilística de fundações tracionadas.

Abstract

Geotechnical engineering is a relatively recent area of civil engineering, which comprises the much less studied topic of foundations under tensile loads. Based on an extensive literature review this paper presents a set of foundation uplift tests carried out for an important transmission line project that allowed to compare the test results with the theory developed at the University of Grenoble, with fairly good results for practical purposes. The test results have also been compared to axisymmetric finite element analysis, also with satisfactory results. This study also presents parametric variations of the soil strength parameters to estimate the variation of the tensile foundation capacity based on sequentially increasing values of cohesion and friction angle. The parametric variation of the soil strength parameters was intended to provide the necessary insight to a complementary probabilistic analysis presented at the end of this dissertation. This work confirms the adequacy and simplicity of the theoretical framework developed at the University of Grenoble comparably to more refined techniques such as finite element analysis, providing a valuable tool for practical design applications. The probabilistic analysis was based on standard FOSM (First Order Second Moment ) approximation, providing estimates of the standard deviation of the tensile foundation capacities to better understand expected variations of the foundation uplift capacity in practical problems.