Weight Optimization of Reinforced Concrete Mat foundation A Case study on Addis Ababa Housing Condominium

Abstract

With the advancement of construction technology and increase in the land scarcity in the cities due to urbanization, the demand of high-rise buildings is at highest priority in real estate projects. The construction of this buildings takes highest investment economies and the designs must concern not only for the serviceability and durability but also the economic advantages. The design of these reinforced concrete structures is performed by conventional methods following the paradigm “estimate-analysis-check” making the design process time consuming and having a larger design margin making it safe but uneconomical. This leads to the optimization concept for having the best performance within the available resources. In this research, a case study of uniform flat plate mat foundation of 3B+G+21 building of the Addis Ababa Housing Condominium project was carried out mainly because the project is currently under review and will be implemented in large scale soon. The research mainly focused on the minimization of weight of the reinforced concrete Mat foundation while satisfying the limitations and specifications described by ES EN 1992-1-1-2015 design code. Structural optimization problems were formulated with inclusion of weight minimization as objective function, design constraints and design variables. The design variables were taken as the area of the reinforcement and the cross-sections of the structural members. The design constraints were formulated based on the design book of ES EN. For the study, MATLAB optimization toolbox software was used for the optimization process. The case study mat has been designed in SAFE Foundation software which were validated in ABAQUS software for accepting the loads for the optimization process. The optimization process was carried out and was able to reduce the total structural weight of the mat foundation by 18.7% while having structural members of 22.24% and 16.58% reduction for beam and slab respectively as compared to the original design. In conclusion, the optimized design is more economical than the conventional design due to the weight reduction the consumption of materials has been reduced and it’s better to consider a more optimized design by satisfying the safety constraints for future use.