Abstract
The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of soil variability on bearing capacity of an embedded foundation in the presence of nonstationary undrained shear strength. The nonstationary undrained shear strength is simulated by a nonstationary random field generator based on the spectral representation method. An embedded foundation buried into the soil to two times of width is presented to investigate the influence of spatially variable undrained shear strength on bearing capacity. Firstly, Monte Carlo simulations are carried out to discuss the effect of distribution type, nonstationary gradient parameter, and horizontal autocorrelation length on the bearing capacity from the standpoint of mean value and standard deviation. Then, the influence of the distribution type on the failure probability of nonstationary random soil is also investigated, with the failure probability for the Beta distribution being demonstrated to be always larger than that for the Lognormal and Gamma distribution.
Highlights
It is widely recognized that soil exhibits spatial variability in both horizontal and vertical direction due to the effects of chemical and environmental changes and soil depositions.is inherent spatial variability of soil becomes the dominating source of uncertainty for the estimation of soil properties from in situ tests [1,2,3]
Random field theory and random finite element method (RFEM) were developed to consider the inherent random variation of soil properties in geotechnical problems, such as the bearing capacity of foundations, the stability of slopes, and soil liquefactions. e past studies have clearly shown the importance of considering the spatial variability of soil property for a rational geotechnical design
E bearing capacity of a shallow foundation is a classical geotechnical problem and has been further studied by probabilistic analysis methods that deal with the spatial variability of soil properties
Summary
It is widely recognized that soil exhibits spatial variability in both horizontal and vertical direction due to the effects of chemical and environmental changes and soil depositions. Due to the lack of relevant researches and more for the accuracy of the estimated bearing capacity, the nonstationary random field model, according to type (b), and the stationary random field model will be both adopted to simulate the undrained shear strength of the soil and investigate the resulting effects of spatial variability on the bearing capacity of a deeply buried foundation. To investigate the effect of distribution type of undrained shear strength cu on the bearing capacity of the embedded foundation, the Lognormal, Gamma, and Beta distributed nonstationary and stationary random fields with the mean value μcu, constant COV, horizontal correlation length lh, and vertical correlation length lv were simulated with the simulating procedure mentioned above. Note that cu of the deterministic analysis corresponding to the nonstationary random fields linearly increases with depth according to M 12
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