1. Each two storey house is to be founded upon a rectangular raft foundation 10m x 7m at a depth of 1.5m with a net pressure of 30kN/m2 applied.

The company you work for is involved with the construction of a sustainable social housing development on a brownfield site.  As a recent graduate you are keen to experience as many aspects of the work as possible and as a result your line manager has given you access to some of the site investigation data from the site (Figure 1) and has asked you to carry out preliminary studies into the following:

1. Each two storey house is to be founded upon a rectangular raft foundation 10m x 7m at a depth of 1.5m with a net pressure of 30kN/m² applied.  To the east of the site borehole data (BH24) shows a thick strata of normally consolidated clay and there are concerns about the magnitude of the settlements generated and time these could take to fully develop.  

Your line manager is a structural engineer and is unclear about the implications of stress history on the magnitude of settlement, write a short report explaining this to her and estimate the predicted maximum differential settlements this might cause under a house in this area.  

The services will be installed six months after each house has been constructed.  At this point it is hoped that any differential settlements left to develop will not exceed 30mm.  Is this case? If not what could be done to accelerate consolidation.

Appendix 1 contains information about this task.

2. A retaining wall is required to replace a slope and retain soil under the communal car park.  Make recommendations about what type of retaining wall would be appropriate and carry out the relevant stability checks. Appendix 2 contains information about this task.  

Regardless of the type of retaining wall that you have designed, write a short report about the relative merits in terms of sustainability of mass gravity, sheet pile and reinforced earth walls.

3. Two wind turbines are to be constructed to supply electricity to the development, these will be about 30m high.  The structural engineers estimate that the variable static actions from each will be 250kN and the permanent action will be 680kN. 

Determine an appropriate foundation (shallow or deep) and check it using EC7.   If you were going to carry out a more comprehensive design what other criteria would you take into account?

Appendix 3 contains information about this task.