Effect of the eccentric load on the bearing capacity of a strip footing founded on sand

Abstract

The finite differences FLAC 2D software which allows to model all soil-structureinteractions regardless of the difficulty of the problems is used to determine the bearing capacityand stress distribution under a rigid strip footing submitted to vertical centered and eccentricloads. The footing is set on a free surface of sand with no surcharge applied. The soil is assumed tobe elastic – perfectly plastic following the Mohr–Coulomb failure criterion. The results of thepresent study show that the conception proposed by Meyerhof tends to underestimate thebearing capacity, especially for large eccentricities. The study proposes an expression of theeffective width that gives reasonable bearing capacity values, even for large eccentricities.