FOUNDATION OPTIMIZATION OF PREFABRICATED PILES

Resumo

The prefabricated foundations of concrete are deep piles driven in situ with a high-quality
concrete, due to its regularized and controlled production at factories. This concrete can be reinforced
or prestressed so it can resist flexure, traction and shear force within the soil, and even during the
transport and handling. The prefabricated pile to be treated in this current study is the centrifuged pile,
which has a circular hollow section. This type of piles has a high-quality concrete, less self-weight,
cheap cost of machinery (pile driver) and dispensable digging. Under the eyes of sustainability,
nowadays people concern a lot about the reduction of construction supplies, avoiding the excessive
waste of those. The objective of this research is to optimize the calculus of prefabricated concrete piles
sizing with circular hollow section to minimize the involved components, consequently reducing the
final cost of the item. In the optimization problem, the project variables are the diameter, the thickness
and the length of the piles, the objection function is the volume, and the project constraints are defined
by the ABNT norms. Therefore, in order to optimize, it’s needed to evaluate the bearing loads, and the
soil and pile structure resistance, searching for an optimal cost, ensuring the safety of the construction
with less consumption of steel and concrete, attending to the project constraints. Thus, will be used the
Excel’s function SOLVER, allied with the semiempirical methods described by Aoki-Velloso (1975)
and Décourt-Quaresma (1978) to obtain optimal project values.