Soil-structure interaction for buildings bearing on shallow foundations

Soil-structure interaction for buildings bearing on shallow foundations. The assumption of perfect supports (fixed or pinned foundations) for the boundary conditions of reinforced concrete buildings has been used for many years by structural engineers. This fact is mainly attributed to the great difficulties faced in the past, when designers needed to calculate buildings by using manual methods. Nowadays, realistic analysis that takes into account the deformability of the adjacent soil foundation is possible, based on the development of powerful computers and computational software packages. However, many structural engineers still use the same simplified boundary conditions widely used in the past. The main explanation for this problem may be the lack of information and models available in the literature, as well as the lack of interaction between structural engineers and foundation engineers. In this context, the present paper aims to present practical recommendations for applying the soil-structure interaction. Additionally, based on some practical examples, this paper shows that the rigid support hypothesis may lead reinforced concrete columns to significant force distortions.