Limiting Tolerable Settlement and Angular Distortion for Building Foundations

To develop reliability-based serviceability criteria for foundation design, the probability distributions of limiting tolerable displacements should be available. In this study, displacement information of 380 buildings, including .124 cases from Hong Kong and Mainland China, is collected for analysis. The background information of these buildings is described. The buildings are divided into four categories for study: soil type, foundation type, structural type, and building usage. Based on the observed performance of these buildings, distributions of the limiting tolerable settlement and angular distortion for each building category are established following a probability-based procedure. The statistics of the limiting tolerable settlement and angular distortion are obtained. It is found that the limiting tolerable displacements of structures of different categories differ significantly. The tolerable displacement distributions can be used directly for full probability-based design or for determining allowable displacements for limit-state or conventional design.