Seismic bearing capacity of circular footings: a yield design approach

Abstract

As developed during the past decades, the yield design theory provides an approach to the stability analysis of civil engineering structures under seismic conditions which has been often used, explicitly or implicitly. New results related to circular footings resting on a purely cohesive soil, taking into account the horizontal inertia forces, are presented in this paper for practical applications to the safety coefficient to be applied to the vertical load when designing seismic foundations. An outline of yield design theory Just to clarify the terminology and to fix the notations, a brief outline of the yield design theory [Salencon 1983; 1990] is recalled here within the three dimensional continuum mechanics framework. It aims at estimating the extreme loads that can be supported by a structure from the knowledge of its geometry, of the loading process it undergoes and of the strength criteria of its constituent materials, whatever the physical phenomena they are related to. Since they do not refer to any data about the constitutive law of its materials before and at failure, the results obtained are but upper bound estimates for the actual ultimate loads and no information can be obtained regarding the displacements. With the generic