Abstract
Interaction of a structure and its foundation with the soil is discussed in this paper, and some of the numerical and analytical methods that have been developed for the analysis of raft and piled raft foundations are presented. It is shown that the use of simple spring models for the soil behaviour can lead to erroneous result and it is recommended that their use should be discontinued. Simple finite layer techniques are also examined, and results are compared with those of three‐dimensional finite element techniques. It is shown that the finite layer techniques can yield good results for displacements in the raft and for moments induced into the piles. It is also shown that the use of thin plate theory for the raft can give good results for thick rafts and can be used for raft and piled raft analysis. The effect of including the stiffness of the superstructure in the analysis of the foundation is examined, and it is shown that the type of structure and its stiffness can have an effect on the deformation of the foundation. Finally, an analysis of an instrumented structure is carried out, and it is shown that reasonably good predictions of the behaviour of the foundation can be made through the use of soil‐structure interaction theory and finite layer techniques.