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STAAD Foundation Advanced Tutorials: Series 2

Isolated Footing Design
Design an Isolated (spread/pad) Footing with STAAD Foundation Advanced

This is the second post to introduce and explain a series of tutorials created to demonstrate different
features of STAAD Foundation Advanced. In a former blog post, the STAAD Foundation Advanced
Tutorial: Series 1 The Basics taught users how to set up proposed foundations and about the
importance of global data. The following is the precursor of the video related to isolated footing design.

Isolated footing is probably the most used foundation type in the program. It is also probably the simplest
of most foundation typesrectangular in shape and placed under one column or support point.
Engineers often use traditional equations as shown below to calculate soil pressures at footing corners.

But the above mentioned equation may not work well if the eccentricity falls beyond the kern. Due to
biaxial moments, stress at all four corners can be different and if the moments are large enough, there
could be uplift or a part of the slab may not be in contact with the soil as shown in the figure below. It can
be tedious to capture all these scenarios by manual calculations and often assumptions and
approximations are made. A program like STAAD Foundation Advanced uses innovative techniques to
accurately calculate soil pressures at all four corners including foundation uplift.

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Please note, the above image is for illustration purposes only. Finite element analysis (FEA) is used here
to analyze an isolated footing and base pressure contour shows how soil pressure is acting on slab. One
corner is not in contact with the soil and a pink line shows a large portion of slab is in uplift. It also shows
one corner is subjected to excessive pressure. The same support was designed as a rigid foundation for
maximum allowable bearing capacity of 4 kip/ft2 and the program automatically picked up a proper
foundation dimension. The table shows the soil pressure at four corners and evidently it matches the
base pressure contour shown above. Also note, pressure at corner 2 shows zero value as that corner is
out of contact with the soil. Similarly, corner 4 shows maximum base pressure and is very close to
allowable bearing capacity.

Pressure at

Pressure at

Pressure at

Pressure at

corner 1 (q1)

corner 2 (q2)

corner 3 (q3)

corner 4 (q4)

Load Case

(kip/ft2)

(kip/ft2)

(kip/ft2)

(kip/ft2)

0.5056

0.0000

0.5056

3.7741

0.5056

0.0000

0.5056

3.7741

0.5056

0.0000

0.5056

3.7741

0.5056

0.0000

0.5056

3.7741

The other important benefit of STAAD Foundation Advanced (SFA) is to calculate the most optimized
foundation dimensions by iterating through hundreds of load combinations as needed. Depending on
project requirements one or more dimensions could be fixed. The software offers many other design
utilities like input for cohesion to resist excessive uplift or the depth of water table to calculate the effect
of buoyancy.

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Rigid Foundation Settings options under Global Settings should be carefully reviewed before
designing an isolated footing. Some of the most important options are:

1. Type of Bearing Capacity (Gross capacity or Net Capacity)

2. Concrete Check self weight settings
3. Reinforcement Placement Option
Gross and net bearing capacity
The difference between gross and net bearing capacity is the soil overburden pressure. It can be written:

Gross Bearing Capacity = Net Bearing Capacity + Soil Overburden

Concrete check self weight settings

Self weight and surcharge are normally not added to design load cases as the shear due to these loads
are nullified by the resulting base pressure. But in some cases eccentricity might fall beyond the footing
length and the solution may never converge. In that scenario, self weight is added to obtain a solution for
shear check and moment design. STAAD Foundation Advanced provides three options to handle these

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situations. It is recommended to use net Pressure option which should handle most scenarios
automatically.

Reinforcement placement option

Moment lever arm to calculate reinforcement requirement is dependent on this option. The following
figure is self explanatory. In previous versions of SFA used to assume Mz (moment about global Z axis)
is the major axis moment and the bottom most layer of reinforcement will always be parallel to global X
direction. Now the user has the option to place reinforcement based on the structural requirements.

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Soil depth for top or bottom fixed option

This option greatly influences the calculation of dead load for service design. It is part of the design
parameters under Soil & Cover section. The user can either fix the depth of the base of the footing or
top of the footing. These options are called bottom fixed and top fixed respectively (refer to the image
below).

If top fixed option is chosen, program will increase footing depth downwards; whereas if bottom fixed
option is chosen, program will increase footing depth upwards. Bottom fixed option is normally chosen
when engineers/contractors want to keep soil excavation depth same for all foundations of a building or
similar structure.

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If initial user-provided minimum footing depth increases during foundation sizing and bottom fixed
option is used, the program will automatically change actual soil depth on top of the footing and pedestal
height. As footing depth increases during concrete checks, the program will re-iterate through all service
load cases and calculate actual bearing pressure for new soil and pedestal height.

Conclusion:
Isolated footing is the simplest form of foundations to design, but to take full advantage of a software
program, it is important to go through the tutorials and understand various options and utilities. STAAD
Foundation Advanced is the leading foundation design software program which automatically offers a
detailed step-by-step calculation sheet along with code clauses, equations, and references. But different
options influence those calculations, some options like cohesion may not be used in all cases, but in
other special cases those could be very useful. So, to optimize your foundation design it is important to
know the assumptions made and options offered by STAAD Foundation Advanced.

In addition, these videos explain more specific about Isolated Footing job:

1)

STAAD Foundation Adv 07: Isolated footing jobs

2)

STAAD Foundation Adv 05: Creating Multiple Jobs on a Single Foundation

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