Civil and Building Engineering.

INTRODUCTION: When designing a foundation, a geotechnical engineer is faced with three primary tasks: selection of the foundation type; computation of the loadcarrying capacity; and computation of the movements of the foundation under the expected loading cases for both short-term and long-term time periods.

Many factors that affect the selection of the type of foundation are discussed in Chapter 8, and the intervening chapters will present the methods recommended for design. All of these chapters assume knowledge of the fundamentals of soil mechanics. This chapter reviews the fundamentals of soil mechanics that must be mastered by any engineer who designs foundations.