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Sponsored by ASCE Continuing Education and the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI).

INSTRUCTOR: Alexander Newman, P.E., F.ASCE

Purpose and Background

Machinery and equipment typically found in industrial and process facilities often exert dynamic loads on their foundations. Designing these foundations is quite complicated, much more so than the design of the foundations that support buildings and statically loaded equipment. (The latter is addressed in the companion ASCE webinar, Design of Foundations for Equipment Supports.) This topic is rarely, if ever, included in the engineering college curricula, and the engineers are left to learn on the job. Yet the stakes are high: The failure of an incorrectly designed machine foundation can lead to damaged equipment and to expensive downtime. 

Many engineering firms that specialize in the design of industrial facilities and heavy-equipment foundations have developed a wealth of in-house design standards, but this information is not available to others. As a result, and because of the design complexity involving dynamic analysis and specialized software, some engineers have used simplistic rules-of-thumb without understanding the limitations of such shortcuts.

The purpose of the webinar is to provide an overview of the practical methods used for the design of dynamically loaded machine and equipment foundations. The attendees will learn about the differences between the foundations for statically and dynamically loaded equipment, which design data should be provided by the equipment manufacturer, which design procedures are available, and when making simplified assumptions is appropriate. The presentation includes a number of short calculations that illustrate various facets of the design.

The structural engineers who design foundations for heavy machinery generally need input of multiple parties. Among them are the equipment manufacturers who provide the dynamic properties of their products and the geotechnical consultants who provide the soil parameters needed for the analysis of soil behavior under dynamic loading. The presentation describes how their data fits into the overall foundation design. The audience is encouraged to ask questions throughout the webinar, which concludes with the final Questions and Answers opportunity.

Learning Outcomes