Displacements and stresses induced by vibrations of machine foundation on clay soil of different degrees of saturation

Abstract

The difficulty that arises in the design of a machine foundation is how to know the behavior of the soil at different soil conditions. Therefore, there are many indications of a need to study machine foundation on soil of different degrees of saturation, covering all the important aspects of clay soil. Experiments on machine foundation (circular and rectangular) were carried out resting on clay soil with different degrees of saturation (100 % and 60 %), in order to find the amplitude displacement of the foundation under different operating frequencies. In addition, the paper describes the vertical stress and displacements inside the soil distributed at three points under the foundation (0.5 B, B, and 2B, B is the foundation width). The experiments results showed that the effect of increasing the degree of saturation is to reduce the amplitude displacement of the foundation to about 61 %. The increase in degree of saturation of soil reduced the vertical stress by about 77 %. The change in the degree of saturation leads to significant action on displacement inside the soil. These influences depend on the distance of the point from the foundation.