Bearing capacity of rigid strip footings near soil slopes

Abstract

A reasonable combination of asymmetric foundation failure and whole slope failure is essential to solve the problem of the ultimate bearing capacity of a rigid strip footing near a soil slope. Based on a bilaterally admissible failure mechanism put forward to meet the requirement of the combination, a closed-form analytical solution to the ultimate bearing capacity is obtained in light of the upper-bound theorem of kinematical limit analysis. The proposed method can quantitatively illustrate that the failure mode of the footing-on-slope system varies from the slope side to the non-slope side with the increase in the horizontal distance ratio of the footing from the slope edge over the width of the footing. For some typical examples, the results calculated using the proposed method are in good agreement with those obtained using other analytical and numerical methods or laboratory model tests. The influences of the shear strength parameters of the soil and safety factor of the slope on the bearing capacity are also discussed in the examples.