Defining boundaries of efficiency for pile-raft foundations

Over the past decade researchers in and outside Russia have shown a heightened degree of interest to piled foundations with a low raft, traditionally referred to as “the pile-raft foundation”. There have been a number of works focusing on bearing capacity of such foundations, e.g. those by R. Katzenbach, H. Puolos, V.G. Fedorovsky and a good number of other leading geotechnical specialists [1, 3, 4].