Husam Al-Mufarji

My pleasure Fawad, 1) to calculate area spring, you have to divide SBC by settlement and multiple with safety used to calculate the SBC. Normally, Geo-technical engineer take 2.5 to 3 as safety factor. ((SBC/Settlement)*FOS). 2) I am really sorry, I don't have the Ultimate Version to check. I used to have it, but I don't remember if I check the punching on the foundation or not. I done it on the floor slabs and it is working fine. Try to create a raft slab instead isolated footings and check. Maybe the footing too small where the punching shear parameter fall outside. 3) I didn't tried to use any of these.

I done a trail and I got correct soil pressure on the footing as you can see on the attachment. I also attached ETABS trail file for your reference. If you still did not figure out the solution, please upload your model, so I can see what is the problem. Trail Model - Footings.EDB

I had tried to do the design of slabs and foundation in ETABS, it is very good and better than SAFE and easier. The drawback of designing the foundation in ETABS is that the full model work together and any change on the foundation sizes or thickness, it changes the stresses on the full system not only the foundation which force you to check the model more than one time to make sure your design is safe. Actually, this way leads to perfect design, but you will lose a lot of time in doing the alterations.

1. We normally create 1m wide strips (0.5m right and 0.5m left) and replicate the strips with 1m distance. on design whatever area of reinforcement comes, we divide it over the number of bars we assume to have. This will give area of one bar. 2. If you provide any beams connected to the column base point, SAFE will not calculate the punching shear (N/C). please provide snap shot of your model to understand how you done it.