Estudo da otimização da fundação de um silo de fundo plano com estacas escavadas

Abstract

Brazil is a major agricultural producer, increasing its production more and more, thus requiring the practice of grain storage. The slab for metallic silos are common in the country, however, in Brazil there is no standard that regulates the design of silo foundations. In this sense, some possibilities for optimizing the foundations of flat-bottom silos are evaluates in this work, maintaining the safety and stability aspects inherent to this type of structure. Thus, different solutions of piled foundation were compared, aiming to improve the performance of this foundation in comparison to the load and settlement curve behavior. For that, the piles were distributed radially in a circular slab non-stiffened slab, and the lengths of the piles were varied from the center to the edge of the slab. For that, numerical analyzes were carried out by the Finite Element Method (FEM-2D) in an axisymmetric model using the RS2 software, with piles and soil situation based on the result of one static load test (slow maintained load), carried out in a bored pile, of 30 cm in diameter and 8 m in length. After the analyzes made through the software, the optimized solutions were then compared to the traditional design with piles of uniform length, and it was observed that the optimizations generate savings in the inputs used and consequently lower carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The cases with longer piles at the center of the raft and shorter at the edge of the slab (PR8-6-4 e PR7-5-3), which presented the best performance and the best cost-benefit ratio.