Bearing Capacity of Circular Footings on Reinforced Soils

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

A method is presented for determining the ultimate bearing capacity of a circular footing reinforced with a horizontal circular sheet of reinforcement placed over granular and cohesive-frictional soils. It was assumed that the reinforcement sheet could bear axial tension but not the bending moment. The analysis was performed based on the lower-bound theorem of the limit analysis in combination with finite elements and linear optimization. The present research is an extension of recent work with strip foundations reinforced with different layers of reinforcement. To incorporate the effect of the reinforcement, the efficiency factors ηγ and ηc, which need to be multiplied by the bearing capacity factors Nγ and Nc, were established. Results were obtained for different values of the soil internal friction angle (ϕ). The optimal positions of the reinforcements, which would lead to a maximum improvement in the bearing capacity, were also determined. The variations of the axial tensile force in the reinforcement sheet at different radial distances from the center were also studied. The results of the analysis were compared with those available from literature.