Sounds like a very risky proposition, given that the engineering characteristics of the uncontrolled fill materials are unknown. Can you perform a plate load test to at least get some degree of confidence in the shallow foundation design?
Rey Villa, MS, PE
http://geotech-apps.com...
The Florida Department of Transportation and the University of Florida have developed a software called "FB-Deep" that calculates driven pile capacities based on SPT N-values (it can also calculate capacities of drilled shafts.) The software is available from the Bridge Software Institute. It...
Uplift resistance is simply the weight of the concrete of the shaft plus the contribution of the skin friction times a reduction factor then apply a factor of safety (or resistance factor for LRFD). For rough surfaces (i.e. rock to concrete), FHWA recommends that generally 80% of the compression...
If I recall the chart you are referring to, it is used to get a rough estimate of the the type of clay mineral that makes up a soil deposit. As far as if they are from the same type of formation, a Geologist (many companies have them in-house) or some research regarding geological formation from...
An interesting note about the Atterberg limits is that Holtz and Kovacs both do not recommend the use of the ASTM method (which requires air-dried samples for limits test) because they produce inconsistent results for some types of soils. They recommend performing the Atterberg limits test at...
You are correct regarding the Plate Load Test. The pressure distribution is very different from what you actually encounter under a foundation. You are also correct about the "k" value being the result of a mathematical model. As with many things in our field, the value of this number comes from...
Identifying fill materials is very difficult even for most experience engineers. The right way to do it is to have knowledge of the local geology, or to do some literary research. I recently wrote a guest article on GeoPrac.net which provides some great tools for identifying geological...
fattdad is correct. You can't exceed saturation of 100%. You are most likely talking about moisture content, which can be in the order of 200% (this is typical for peat).
Rey Villa, MS, PE
http://geotech-apps.com
You can always conservatively assume a 2V:1H stress distribution. Wheel loads generally only extend about 5 feet below the ground surface.
Rey Villa
http://geotech-apps.com
Soil classification is one of the most important things that a Geotechnical Engineer should be able to do properly. There are many geotechs who don't know how to properly distinguish soil from rock (silly right?) or do research to find existing soil data to know the types of soil aor formations...
Don't think it's harmful, just annoying. You can always put the machine outside for a couple of hours to let the worst of it burn there.
Rey Villa
http://geotech-apps.com
2B to 4B is generally the depth of influence for settlement. If you want to be conservative, you can assume that the failure surface will be 2B for square footing and 4B for continuous footings for granular and fine-grained soils. Generally B is approximately where the failure surface will be...
