Questions for the NZ Engineers.
I'm working on a pile cap design and our principal engineer is requiring me to design it using srtut and tie method. When I was checking for the allowable stress on strut, my compression force is failing on the bottle neck area if I use Bs=0.6, so what I did is use Bs=0.75 which will require me to put minimum reinforcement on my pilecap. But when I read through NZS 3101 Appendix A.5 Complimentary for minimum reinforcement, I saw a paragraph that says for pilecaps there's no need to put minimum reinforcements, use Bn=0.8. This made me confused. There's no need to use min reinf but the factor increased from 0.75 to 0.8? Any thoughts on the matter? Have you encountered this? What do you think is the reason for the increase in factor?
I'm working on a pile cap design and our principal engineer is requiring me to design it using srtut and tie method. When I was checking for the allowable stress on strut, my compression force is failing on the bottle neck area if I use Bs=0.6, so what I did is use Bs=0.75 which will require me to put minimum reinforcement on my pilecap. But when I read through NZS 3101 Appendix A.5 Complimentary for minimum reinforcement, I saw a paragraph that says for pilecaps there's no need to put minimum reinforcements, use Bn=0.8. This made me confused. There's no need to use min reinf but the factor increased from 0.75 to 0.8? Any thoughts on the matter? Have you encountered this? What do you think is the reason for the increase in factor?