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The bearing capacity of axially loaded embedded foundations has been widely studied using analytical and numerical methods. However, there are many discrepancies in the literature results regarding the bearing capacity factors and depth factors of circular embedded footings proposed by different authors. Terzaghi's hypothesis has been used to assess the bearing capacity of shallow foundations and several analytical solutions have been proposed for computing bearing capacity factors, even though a superposition of individual contributions may lead to some error in the computed bearing capacity. This assumption has sometimes been criticized as being more conservative. This article aims to study two problems; The first part is focuses on the numerical evaluation of the superposition hypothesis in the calculation of the bearing capacity for rough circular foundations embedded in sand. In this section, the bearing capacity factors contributing to the conventional solution have been evaluated and superposition errors are indicated and compared with those found by different authors. The latter part of the work is devoted to studying the depth effect on the estimation of the bearing capacity of a rough circular footing embedded in the sand considering presence of an overload adjacent. For both analyses, the finite-difference code Flac2d (FLAC 2007) was used to reach the bearing capacity for embedded circular footings, the ground friction angles are between 25° and 40° and a depth ratio Df/D varies from 0.1 to 2. The calculation results are presented in tables and graphs and compared to previously published results available in the literature.
Belkacem et al. (Fri,) studied this question.