Geotechnics and Special Foundations

The SGAI activities in the wide field of geotechnics and in particular for the foundations and supporting structures of the excavations date back to the late 60s. Since then, numerous and increasingly demanding activities have been undertaken using primarily internal resources of the company, employed directly for the investigation, for the design and for the development of dedicated software. Nowadays are also used commercial calculation programs, validated and widely distributed.

For the design of the foundation work, direct and indirect, traditional and special, SGAI uses the current technical standards for construction as required by the case, may be the national legislation, European, or international depending on the project and on the request.

Indicatively, excluding special issues related to the peculiar characteristics of the work under consideration, the design process follows a framework based on the following criteria:

• Identification of key issues and their articulation into topics that represent the different aspects of the problem to be analyzed and quantified in the course of the design;
• Synthetic description of the development;
• Indication of some criteria and methods among the best known.

The level of the detailing of the topics depends on the peculiarities of the work and the design phase that is being addressed (Preliminary Design, Final Design, Executive Project).

All different design aspects are studied, analyzed and produced using tested calculation programs, some of which still developed directly inside, in order to provide what serves for the execution of the works and follow, assist the client in the most appropriate technological choices to define the interventions of consolidation, drainage, and foundation support that the lithological and lithostratigraphic characteristics of the site concerned would require for optimal success of interventions.

Thanks to our experience and the close collaboration of our team, made up of engineers and geologists, in the study of soil-structure interaction, our strengths are also the planning and supervision of in situ geotechnical investigations and laboratory tests, the definition of local stratigraphy and of the mechanical characteristics of the soil, in order to obtain the correct geotechnical parameters for the design. On the basis of a vast knowledge of the instability mechanisms found in Italy and abroad, our skills also include the identification of landslides, the verification of slope stability under static and seismic conditions and the design of stabilization methods for the slopes.