A senior principal at specialist consultancy Coffey Geotechnics, Frances has worked on many of the engineering marvels of the last decade, including the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai. She has also been an advisor on the Incheon Tower in South Korea, which is expected to be the tallest twin tower in the world when completed, as well as a range of home-grown buildings on the Gold Coast, in Sydney’s CBD and in Melbourne’s Docklands.
Frances is currently consulting on the KL100 building in Kuala Lumpur, the Barangaroo development in Sydney and co-authoring the foundation design guidelines for mega structures on behalf of international organisation, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
“Designing foundations for very tall buildings is such a specialist field, as conventional design approaches cannot be applied. These mega buildings are supported on relatively short foundations, and our main role is to predict how they will behave over time under the very large building loads.
“In the design of foundations for tall buildings, both lateral and vertical loadings are of great importance. A small rotation at the foundation will be magnified to a very large degree at the top of the structure due to the height of the building, which will then affect the serviceability and functionality of the building,” she said.
Frances has also been fortunate to be mentored by arguably the world’s most celebrated geotechnical engineer, Professor Harry Poulos, whose accomplishments have been recognised by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Engineers Australia and the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering.
And it is now Frances’ turn to play the role of mentor to talented geotechnical engineer Dr Helen Chow. Recently, the two women have co-authored a paper which Helen presented at the International Conference for Women Engineers and Scientists.
However, Frances is quick to comment that Helen’s gender was irrelevant to being given the opportunity to be mentored.
“Coffey Geotechnics’ success in tall buildings has always been a marriage of theoretical knowledge and practical expertise, and Helen’s academic background with numerical analysis of foundations complements this well.
“Having said that, career success is about making the most of the opportunities as they arise, and these windows don’t always come at the most convenient time, but Helen has grasped these as they have been presented,” Frances explained.
Coffey Geotechnics group executive Sukumar Pathmanandavel said this was a great story of not only women at the top of their field but also of Australian engineering leading the world.
“About a decade ago, Coffey Geotechnics revolutionised the way foundations were designed for tall buildings by developing an in-house computer program to independently check the piled raft system of a building.
“For the Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai, we recommended that pile designs be based on the results of constant normal stiffness direct shear tests, which was a notable departure from the conventional approach that involved the correlation of field test results with pile design parameters. Since then, this scientific method has been used for major design projects around the world,” he noted.
Frances and Helen’s paper “Challenging Design: Foundations for Tall Buildings” discusses the major issues associated with designing foundations for such super-tall buildings, including the ultimate capacity of the foundation, the influence of cyclic nature, settlement, the structural design of the foundation, imposed ground movement, earthquake effects and dynamic response to wind-induced forces.
The paper also explores the three-staged design process:
Phase 1: Subsurface exploration
- Desktop study
- Site specific geotechnical investigation
Phase 2: Foundation design
- Develop geotechnical models and parameters
- Preliminary foundation design
- Refine design
Phase 3: Foundation testing and monitoring
- Pile load test
- Performance monitoring.
The paper concludes by describing the innovative approaches used to design the foundations of the proposed 151-storey Incheon Tower in South Korea and the one-kilometre-high Nakheel Tall Tower in Dubai.
Media contact
Angela James, Manager, Corporate Communications, Coffey International Limited
P: (+61) (2) 8404 4415; M: (+61) 42 8 905 573; E: angela_james@coffey.com
