Despite recent improvements in soil characterisation, geotechnical exploration and construction methodologies, 66.7% of overhead transmission line foundation design engineers use prescriptive design methods with applied traditional factors of safety between 2.5 to over 4.0, to design foundations in the face of uncertainties in ground conditions and design criteria, non-linear nature of the load-displacement response of foundations and the prescriptive design's tendency to give linear solutions. Hence, the use of full-scale foundations and static load tests to assess the overall response of foundations. A Ø900mm pile and 3 pad foundations along Uganda's 400 kV Karuma Interconnection Project were designed, constructed and tested under uplift, compression and lateral loads as per the respective failure modes. The results suggested that the maximum displacements were within 0.36-18.96% of the prescriptive 25 mm value for uplift, 3.32% of the prescriptive 25 mm value for compression, and 4.78% of the prescriptive 50 mm value for the lateral load test in conformity to IEC 61773 (1996) and COMESA/FDHS 293 (2007). The foundations' insitu load capacities from the hyperbolic graphs as per the Chin-Kondner extrapolation (1971), confirmed that the foundations could adequately resist the working loads at 100% and ultimate design loads at 130%, despite uncertainties of moderately aggressive chemical environment exposures as per BS EN 206 (2013) or soils with medium to high degrees of plasticity with low swell potentials.
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