Some aspects of the structural design of a mat foundation for various soil conditions

There are several important structural design parameters in the analysis of a mat type structure for a jackup mobile offshore drilling unit. These consist of dimensions for the mat, soil foundation types, and structural loads. Methods for determining the proper dimension of the mat structure, modeling the structure and its loading cases, modeling the soil conditions and a method for identifying critical load cases for each element and load case is presented. By using a database approach for the finite element output for all of the various loading cases, a rational approach is presented which solves the problem of sorting and analyzing all of the elements and load cases, ensuring that all are included and none of the critical cases are missed.