Assessment of bearing capacity of interfering strip footings located near sloping surface considering artificial neural network technique

Abstract

The bearing capacity of interfering footings located near the slope face suffers from reduced bearing capacity due to the formation of the curtailed passive zone. Depending upon the position of the footing, their spacing and steepness of the slope, different extents of bearing capacity reduction can be exhibited. A series of finite element investigation has been done with the aid of Plaxis 3D vAE.01 to elucidate the influence of various geotechnical and geometrical parameters on the ultimate bearing capacity of interfering surface strip footings located at the crest of the natural soil slope. Based on the large database obtained from the numerical simulation, a 6-8-1 Artificial Neural Network architecture has been considered for the assessment of the ultimate bearing capacity of interfering strip footings placed on the crest of natural soil slope. Sensitivity analyses have been conducted to establish the relative significance of the contributory parameters, which exhibited that for the stated problem, apart from shear strength parameters, the setback ratio and spacing of footing are the prime contributory parameters.