Bearing capacity of shallow footing under combined loading

The paper deals with two bearing capacity problems of shallow footing under combined loading. The first is a FEM study of shallow strip footing on two-layer clay deposits subjected to a vertical, horizontal and moment combined loading, while the second is a centrifuge study of shallow rectangular footing on dry sand under double eccentricity. The FEM results revealed that the existence of top soft layer sensitively affects more on horizontal and moment capacity than vertical capacity for cases of footing on soft clay overlying stiff clay. Practical design charts are presented to evaluate bearing capacities of footing for various combinations of the ratio of the depth of the upper layer to the footing width and the ratio of undrained strength of the upper layer to that of the lower. The centrifuge tests indicated that current design practice of calculating failure load of rectangular surface footing under double eccentricity underestimates the centrifuge loading test data. This trend is more marked when the eccentricity becomes larger. The decreasing trend in failure load with an increase of double eccentricity is rather uniquely expressed by a single curve, using a newly defined resultant eccentricity and the diagonal length of the footing base.