Practical boundary element method for piled rafts

In this paper, a practical boundary element method (BEM) is developed to analyze piled rafts. The raft is modeled using the direct boundary element formulation for thick plates; which is suitable for such type of problems. An innovative methodology to add stiffness matrices to the plate integral equations is developed. Hence, pile-soil-raft interactions are added as a special case of the developed methodology. In order to avoid generating huge systems of coupled equations, an effective condensation technique of piles and soil degrees of freedom (DOFs) at pile-soil-raft interface is employed. Several numerical examples are presented and results are compared to previously published results. Then, a practical application is solved to demonstrate the strength and versatility of the proposed formulation.