Design of Pile Foundation for Distillation Column

Abstract

Abstract Equipment foundation is one of the most critical facility in every petrochemical, fertilizer, oil and gas plants. This equipment comprises distillation columns, vertical vessels, horizontal vessels, high pressure exchangers, reactors etc. Out of this equipment, distillation column is one of the most critical equipment due to its large diameter and height hence resulting into heavy dead load and heavy transverse loads at the base of column. Hence proper foundation system should be designed to cater all these loading without affecting the strength and serviceability of the foundation system. In most of the cases due to poor bearing capacity of soil one need to go for pile foundation. This paper summarizes the Indian code and process industry practices, design loads and load combinations to be adopted for design of pile foundation. One sample example is solved to evaluate the no of piles for column foundation by assuming suitable loading and vessel data.