Economical Design of Circular Footings Adjacent to Slopes on Sandy Soils

Abstract

The analysis presented here introduces three optimization techniques namely, Hooke and Jeeves, Fletcher-Reeves and Davidon-Fletcher-Powell as applied to design of the circular footing adjacent to slopes. A computer program was developed to solve this design problem using the conventional structural design approach in conjunction with these methods, A simple study was performed to detect the sensitivity of the objective function to its design variables. A further parametric study was performed regarding the geometric configurations of the footing and loading conditions in order to provide the geotechnical engineer with some useful design curves. Hooke and Jeeves method has been proved to be very instructive in exposing the effect of the other methods. It has been proved that the minimum cost of the circular footing increases with the increase of the load whereas it decreases as the angle of internal friction increases and the Dcl/B ratio (column diameter/diameter of footing).