Scale effect of rectangular and square footing of shallow foundation resting on cohesive soil

Abstract

Abstract This experimental research work was performed to evaluate settlement and bearing capacity in cohesive soil. The predominant objective of this study is to develop the existing state of the knowledge about the present simulation processes to estimate its settlement and load carrying capacity. From the past literature study, the semi-empirical procedures were studied to estimate the settlement and bearing capacity parameters. The investigation was done into three parts, based on the past literature studies. The index and laboratory experimental investigations were done in the first stage. In the second part, the experimental procedure was elaborated to determine the settlement and load carrying capacity of small-scale model tests on cohesive soil. This research works presents, the effect of small-scale laboratory tests on the load carrying and settlement of model footings. The experiments were carried out with three types of model footing such as square, rectangular, and circular shapes were chosen to study the scale effect. For the circular footing, the diameters of 30, 40, and 50 mm sizes of plates were used and for square and rectangular model footings dimensions were used as 30mm×30 mm, 40mm ×40 mm, and 50mm ×50 mm and 50mm ×33 mm, 40mm ×28 mm, and 30mm ×20 mm respectively. A steel tank of size 330×220×300 mm was fabricated and used for conducting model tests. The width of the plates ranged from 50mm to 100mm for modeling plane strain and axisymmetric problems and care taken to avoid the wall friction when the load is applied. The size effects on settlement and bearing capacity was studied under different moisture conditions such as optimum moisture and plastic limit of the soil.