foundation designs for telecommunication towers

huangyhg

foundation designs for telecommunication towers
hi,
i have been trying to find a sort of a guide to use a design software for drilled piers for telecommunication towers. the software is made by powerline systems and it is call caisson. i am currently having difficulties trying to come up with suitable or workable foundation designs for such structures.
anyone out there that have used this design program before or using it now and have some good tips i would gladly appreciate the help. i have been designing monopoles for over 7 years, but foundation for such structures only for 4 months.
i thank you in advance for your help, and if this is not the right forum for this thread please advise which forum will be the most appropiate.
forum 256.  also, check into lpile.
i tried to find forum 256 but could not. could you post a link to it.
i thought about lpile, but we did not pruchase that program. we purchased caisson from power line systems. i tried to ask questions to the folks at power line but was not succesfull.
i mean i know it must be fairly simple and just a matter of interpretting the soils report, but for a person that has never done so, it turns out it is not that simple. hence the reason i am looking for some guidence other than the "manual" that power line provides with its softwares.
it's the foundation engineering forum under geotechnical engineers.
all the monopole foundation designs i saw came from the tower manufacturer, based on a boring log / geotech report that we supplied to them.  the foundation design came as part of the "package" for buying their tower.
see if you can get your hands on the aashto standard specs for highway signs....
they have a section on single caisson(pier) foundations with charts to get depth of embedment.
jmiec----i will look under that particular forum. i will let you know how it came out. thanks
dmcgrath---i know that the foundation designs comes from the tower supplir. i worked for a tower supplier before, but we never had to bother on supplying the foundation design. we outsourced that. now that i work for a different tower supplier, aside from the monopole design, i have to do a foundation design. here is where the problem is. i have no education on this other than reading the caisson manual 4 months ago when i started this job. i just need a little more guidence on soils interpretations.
csd72----thanks for the tip on the aashto std. i will try to get a hold of it as soon as i can. my company is not a great spender on books, but i am trying to build a library of engineering books directed to the design of towers.
i use power line systems software for analyzing transmission towers and poles, but do not do the foundations. i believe in putting my mistakes up in the air where everyone can see them, not burying them in the ground. ;)
we (our geotech's) do not use the caisson software module and use either lpile or a beam-column program that was done for us many years ago by a university of houston professor michael o'neil.
like most of the pls software, they assume a through knowlege of the subject and do not have time to educate users with no experience.
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i have been called "a storehouse of worthless information" many times.
transmissiontowers..... i believe on fixing my mistakes before they become real, and that is why i have post this thread, to get the understanding needed to use the caisson program.
paaz,
i agree with transmissiontower.  why put your neck on the line for any area not of your expertise?  spread the risk around to someone else and hire an consultant.  if you were a geotechnical engineer and fully understood how l-pile works, then plugging into a black box may be your thing.  but i sure hope you didn't sell something to your client that you cannot deliver.  been there done that.  good luck with everything.
str04
str04, thanks for your concern. currently we outsource our foundation designs like many other tower vendors in the industry.
however, i would like to get familiar with the design of drilled pier foundations so i can strat designing some of those too.
for what i have read, lpile is the software to have. apparently not a lot of, if not none, information regarding the caisson software from the powerline people.
thaks for all of the information, but i will continue my quest to find some expertise on caisson.