Pile Cap Design

[abusementpark]

I am just curious what everyone uses to design pile caps.

Is there a certain program that is good for pile cap design?Does anyone still use quick and dirty hand methods?

I am refering to the structural design of the pile cap, not the distribution of forces to the individual piles.

 

[Dad2one]

For the CRSI program you have to enter each pile's coordinates.

Beam analysis with typical program? You can't use a strictly beam analysis or you'll overlook punching shears. And, I'm not sure they do deep shear.

Some of the other general purpose programs can be used very successfully but for a quick check they can be a little cumbersome. Also have to be careful with punching shear results when using the deep finite elements that they use. Sometimes we get very strange results.

No, it does not have to be too complicated but after checking caps for a large project the hand calculations became tiresome.