Study of Tilt on Adjacent Strip Footings

Abstract

The primary function of the foundation of a structure is to safely transfer the loads from the superstructure to the soil beneath without occurrence of shear failure and excessive settlements. Due to rapid urbanisation, very often structures and their foundations are built close to each other. Foundation of the newly built and the already existing structures interferes with each other to some extent depending on their relative positions. Due to large stresses at points between the footings (due to overlapping of stresses), there is a non-uniform pressure distribution beneath the footings and beyond in the gap between the footings. There is an increase in stresses from the outer edge of the footing to the inner edge. This causes tilt in the footings. This numerical study looks into the tilt of two adjacent strip footings on the surface of cohesive and cohesionless soils. Numerical analysis using a finite element-based software is being used. The parameters varied in this study are the clear distance between the two adjacent rigid strip footings and width of the footings. One of the footings representing an already existing foundation is loaded with half of the estimated failure load of isolated footing and adjacent footing loaded up to failure. The effect of interference is observed to be particularly significant in terms of the tilt. © 2021, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.