FOUNDATION DESIGN OF ELEVATED EXPRESS HIGHWAY FROM TARNOL INTERCHANGE TO RAWAT, PAKISTAN

Abstract

The inadequate infrastructure of Pakistan has always been the sole problem for the country‟s development and to the economy. The lack in modern techniques related to civil engineering industry causes Pakistan huge losses every year. The lack of transportation routes and excessive traffic loads on them has caused many problems in navigating through cities. Natural disasters like earthquake, flooding, excessive precipitation has always damaged the substandard structures in Pakistan whether they are high rise buildings, underpasses and bridges. They have been converted to dust within seconds in natural disasters due to lack of proper soil investigation studies, design techniques involving selection of suitable foundation for a safe structure. We as the undergraduate students of civil engineering-geotechnical depth have case studied the soil strata of twin cities of Pakistan that is Islamabad and Rawalpindi and have proposed an elevated highway express which is safe, efficient and economical. The 39 kilometers highway express is going to be elevated throughout and is being built on the concept of deep foundations specifically the pile foundations. We have collected and analyzed the soil investigation data for this particular route. The SPT values up to 40 m borehole depth were collected from existing mega structures on the route. A geotechnical soil profile was drawn and suitable pile foundation design was given according to the varying soil strata of the route. We adopted various methods like Reese and O Neil for cast in-situ pile design and Gamma-Z method for driven pile design after generating efficient excel spreadsheets which incorporate varying strata Cohesion, Angle of friction and SPT blow counts. We analyzed different methods of designing as well as different types of piles according to material and structural design and carried out the cost analysis of every method to select the best economical, safe and practical design and scheduling of whole project is done spanning 2.6 years.