Bearing Capacity Behavior of Skirted Foundations on Unsaturated Soils

Abstract

One of the most important factors for designing a safe foundation is the amount of bearing soil capacity and allowable settlement according to the type of structure. Therefore, in geotechnical engineering, the aim is to improve foundations' bearing capacity in many ways, some of which are expensive, and the other section is difficult to implement in some sites. Skirted foundations consider as an ideal solution to improve cost-wise soil tolerance by reducing materials and installation time. At present, there are several applications, including offshore platforms, bridges, turbines, oil installations, and high-load facilities. This paper investigates the behavior of carrying capacity of skirted foundations through experimental models on the sand. To examine the effect of various saturation conditions, various ratios of length to width of the footing base at different relative densities and different conditions for saturations dry, saturated, and partially saturated soils are considered. It was found that the magnitude of soil bearing enhances with increasing ratios of length to the width of the base of the footings for all cases. The increase in performance ratio increased linearly to 1.5 in footing depth (D/B) and then decreased according to the test results after this point.

Keywords

• skirt footing
• skirt depth
• partially saturation
• bearing capacity
• matric suction