Abstract
A major concern in design of structures is to provide precise estimations of ultimate bearing capacity of soil beneath their foundations. Direct determination of the bearing capacity of foundations requires performing expensive and time consuming laboratory tests. To cope with this issue, several numerical models have been presented by researchers. This paper presents the development of a new design equation for the prediction of the ultimate bearing capacity of shallow foundations on granular soils using linear genetic programming (LGP) methodology. The ultimate bearing capacity is formulated in terms of width of footing, footing geometry, depth of footing, unit weight of sand, and angle of shearing resistance. The LGP-based design equation is established using the results of several load tests on real sized foundations presented in the literature. Validity of the model is verified using a part of laboratory data that are not involved in the calibration process. The statistical measures of coefficient of determination, root mean squared error and mean absolute error are used to evaluate the performance of the model. Sensitivity and parametric analyses are conducted and discussed. The proposed model accurately characterizes the ultimate bearing capacity resulting in a very good prediction performance. The LGP model reaches a better prediction performance than the well-known prediction equations for the bearing capacity of shallow foundations.
Highlights
Columns, bearing walls or other bearing members transmit the building loads to foundations
A new prediction model is derived for the ultimate bearing capacity of shallow foundations using the linear genetic programming (LGP) approach
The values of the performance indices (R2, root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE)) indicate that the LGP model does not outperform the ANFIS, fuzzy inference system (FIS) and Artificial neural networks (ANNs) solutions presented in the literature
Summary
Columns, bearing walls or other bearing members transmit the building loads to foundations. A foundation is the lowest part of a structure which transmits loads to the underlying soil. Considering the depth of construction, the foundations can be classified into two major groups of shallow and deep foundations. A foundation with a depth (D) to width (B) ratio less than or equal to three or four (D/B ≤ 3 or 4) is called a “shallow foundation” (Das 1995; Cerato 2005). Fig. shows a definition sketch for shallow foundations. Any foundation design must meet three essential requirements (Chen, Duan 2000): (1) providing adequate safety against structural failure of the foundation, (2) offering adequate bearing capacity of soil beneath the foundation with a specified safety against ultimate failure, and (3) achieving acceptable total or differential settlements under working loads
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