Efficiency of different methods to predict settlement of shallow foundation in cohesionless soil

Abstract

During the last decades, many methods have been developed to predict the settlement of shallow foundations on cohesionless soils based on the results of SPT. However, such prediction methods with the required degree of accuracy and consistency have not yet been developed. The current study is an attempt to evaluate the performance of some of these methods and obtain the most efficient one. This goal has been performed by evaluating and ranking eight common methods. These methods are Terzaghi and peck, Meyerhof 1, Bowles (1986), Parry, Schultze and Sherif, Meyerhof 2, Burland and Burbidge and Anagnostopoulos et al.. A total number of 189 cases published in the literature were adopted to carry out the ranking analysis of the selected methods. The concept of rank analysis depends in general on four approaches. These approaches are Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency, arithmetic average & standard deviation, accumulative probability analysis, and Log-Normal distribution of the ratio between the predicted and measured settlement. The results of the analysis revealed that the Anagnostopoulos et al. method have got the first rank with a rank index of 6 while Terzaghi and peck have achieved the last rank with rank index of 27. Therefore, Anagnostopoulos et al. method can be used to estimate the settlement of shallow foundations based on the results of SPT with high confidence.