The Behaviour of Confined Granular soil loaded by a square footing

Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , Pages 95-110

Authors

¹ Civil Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, University of Sulaimani – Kurdistan Region

This research involves the behaviour of confined granular soil supported by a

square footing. A series of bearing capacity tests were carried out on a small-scale

laboratory model, which filled with sand, placed in a dense state and confined with

UPVC cell. The response of an unconfined state was measured in the beginning,

and then compared with the confined sand. The studied variables included the

cylinder height and diameter, the depth of the footing to the top of the cylinder and

the embedded depth of the footing.

The test results indicated that the soil confinement resists lateral displacement of

sand underneath the footing, which is leading to a significant improvement for the

response of the footing. The curves of load-settlement generally showed the same

trend in all the cases. Failure was considered as a settlement, which was equal to

8% of the total footing width. Also, the recommended optimum cell height,

diameter, footing depth to the top of the cylinder and the embedded depth of

footing that give the maximum bearing capacity improvement were presented and

discussed. According to the present research results, a conclusion based on the soil

confinement role and found to be notably increased the bearing capacity and

stiffness. Furthermore, a modification of load–settlement behaviour of the sub

grade sand was also gained.

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