Stresses and displacements in an elastic mass due to distributed loading by discretization technique

Abstract

Numerical solutions have been obtained for stresses and displacements in a linear elastic half space due to distributed loads of circular, rectangular and elliptical shapes. The technique primarily involves use of a multi-dimensional numerical integration technique to integrate point load solutions over the distributed loading after discretizing the area into a finite number of elements. Both uniform vertical and shear loads have been considered as well as vertical conical loads and inward shear loads. The technique evolved facilitates the determination of stresses and displacements by the use of mini-computers and is neither as tedious and cumbersome as the use of tables and charts nor as costly as FEM solutions. A detailed comparison has been presented between the results obtained by the numerical solutions and those of the existing analytical solutions wherever they are available. It is found that the agreement between the two is within one per cent for displacements at all depths for the different cases studied. The matching is also good in the case of stresses, except at shallow depths.