Updates for PileCalc designer tool

Pålkommissionen Report 108

Swedish Pålkommissionen, the Commission on Pile Research, published a new report 108 earlier this year. The report 108 considers the design of composite piles of steel and concrete according to the Eurocode design standards and national design guidelines of Sweden.

The main topic of the report is to give instructions and guidelines for calculations on structural buckling resistance of composite piles. Beside that it gives instructions on calculations on geotechnical resistance of drilled RD piles filled with concrete.

The report sets also rules for the execution side at the site. Utilization of composite effect in not only related to design, it requires also some special attention at site.

Structural buckling resistance

Implementation of report 108 brought several different improvements and changes to the program. Naturally the guidelines and limitations given in report 108 were implemented, but also for example the consideration of creep on concrete material was improved and made more detailed. The program has for example new input fields for the design service life and stress ratio. These are related to calculation of the creep coefficient for concrete. Both these fields have pre-calculated values, but naturally the designer can manually input own project related values.

Geotechnical resistance

In situations where an RD pile is filled with concrete to utilize the composite effect, the PDAs are still often made for empty pile. For such situation the report 108 sets rules for maximum possible increase of the geotechnical resistance due to the concrete filling. This has now been implemented to the calculation of geotechnical resistance in PileCalc.

Where to find the PileCalc program
PileCalc as well as PileWallCalc program for SSAB pile products are available for free at SSAB Tubular Design Tools. From the same place you can also find FrameCalc and FrameFEM design tools for steel structures.

More information on RR® and RD® piles and RD® pile wall www.ssab.com/infra