The Role of Utilizing Load in Different Cases While Numerical Modeling of Multi-story Buildings on Alluvial Stratum: A Comparison Study

Abstract

Industrialization and population growth have made surface areas more valuable, thereby the multi-story buildings have become an absolute necessity. At this point, numeric models became the fastest and simplest way to evaluate the response of soils and structures. The issued factor in the current paper is related to the way of transferring the multi-story building loads to an alluvial stratum and evaluate the accuracy of different cases, in order to save time and economy. For load transfer, the first case (case i) includes uniform distributed load, the second case (case ii) includes the transfer from the basement columns and walls, and the third case (case iii) includes modeling the real state of the building. Mainly, all three cases gave close results in terms of settlement magnitudes of 2.21, 1.96, and 1.81 cm, respectively. It was inspected that case (i) showed 12.8% more deformation than case (ii) and 22.1% more deformation than case (iii). However, the situation is not the same for the settlement pattern, and the under-column and corner effects are neglected in uniform load. Additionally, the bending moments, which is a critical parameter for the design of a reinforced concrete foundation, have developed different results. In case (ii) and (iii) a bending moment of 500 kNm/m is observed in the center column, while in case (i) the moments converge to 0. Therefore, this study highlights the importance of outstanding decision making when assessing the load-transferring mechanism in modeling with numerical methods. The necessity of the determination of the convenient load transfer way depending on the parameter that is crucial in the evaluation of the soil–structure interaction comes to the fore with current paper.