Development of a CSA Standard on Geotechnical Design for Buildings

The National Building Code of Canada (and hence Canada) currently lacks an enforceable minimum safety standard for the design of its foundations. It is becoming increasingly apparent to the geotechnical community that the lack of a minimum standard of practice for such a critical component of each building, its foundation, leads to either inefficient designs, and so a waste of limited funds, or to designs which fall below a societally acceptable level of safety. At the moment, building foundations in Canada are designed using either manuals or codes of practice from other jurisdictions (e.g., the Eurocode), so that there is no enforceable minimum safety standard for building foundations in Canada.
A task group of the National Building Code of Canada has developed a geotechnical design code which will eventually become a CSA Standard on Geotechnical Design for Buildings. The only remaining need now is the calibration of the code design factors required to achieve minimum safety levels for building foundations. The objective of this research project is to determine the required design factors.

Faculty Supervisor:

Gordon Fenton

Student:

Gennaro Esposito

Partner:

Canadian Standards Association

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

University:

Dalhousie University

Program: