Seismic bearing capacity of shallow foundations rested on anisotropic deposits

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper investigated the effect of the anisotropy of the internal friction angle on the seismic bearing capacity factor of shallow foundations placed over a frictional soil deposit with the adoption of pseudo-static and pseudo-dynamic seismic loading approaches. The simplified Coulomb failure mechanism was assumed, and the method of analysis was limit equilibrium formulation. The results of the two approaches showed that the seismic bearing capacity factor decreases with increase in the degree of anisotropy and seismic accelerations. However, the pseudo-dynamic seismic loading approach was shown to return higher bearing capacity predictions for the footings rested over the anisotropic soil deposits in comparison to the pseudo-static approach. For the both approaches, the bearing capacity of the overlying shallow footing is lost after a certain base excitation. The results of this study were presented in charts and tabular forms and were compared well with findings of other researchers.