Settlement of shallow footings on layered soil: state-of-the-art

Abstract

Shallow footings form the foundations of conventional structures like residential as well as industrial framed buildings and also other industrial structures like silos, chimneys, cooling towers, overhead tanks, etc. The foundations are checked both for shear failure and settlement criterion. Most of the conventional analyses consider the soil to be homogeneous, however, soil strata comprise of different soil layers with inherent variability. Several analytical, numerical, and experimental research works are available for the analysis of shallow footings on layered soil system. This paper presents comprehensive overview of literature pertaining to the settlement analysis of shallow foundations on layered soil system. It was aimed to provide all the references at one place to facilitate the research workers in this area. Deterministic as well as probabilistic studies have been compiled and it is felt that deterministic methods should be used in conjunction with the stochastic approaches for more rational analysis of shallow foundations on layered soils.