Failure mechanism and bearing capacity of footings buried at various depths in spatially random soil

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the spatial variability of random soil affects the failure mechanism and the ultimate bearing capacity of foundations buried at various depths. A nonlinear finite-element analysis combined with random field theory is employed to explore the vertical capacity of foundations embedded at different depths in random soil. Different possibilities of shear failures resulting from spatial patterns of soil are demonstrated and are used to explain the significant discrepancy between the bearing capacity of the random soil and that of uniform soil. The effect of the spatial pattern of the soil on the development of shear planes is also investigated, wit..