Soil sounding location optimisation for spatially variable soil

Abstract

A novel approach for estimating foundation bearing capacity, conditioned by soil sounding locations in the case of spatially variable soil properties, is proposed in the study. This method uses a kinematic approach in conjunction with Vanmarcke spatial averaging, which substantially improves the numerical efficiency when solving three-dimensional problems over that of existing methods. Therefore, the approach can be used in optimisation procedures dedicated to the search for optimal soil sounding locations – that is, the locations for which the lowest possible bearing capacity standard deviation is obtained. This paper provides a complete algorithm for considering soil soundings in the bearing capacity estimation of rectangular foundations. The application of the algorithm for two soil sounding locations is described in this study, the obtained numerical efficiency is very high; namely, one bearing capacity estimation of a rectangular foundation takes approximately 0·5 s on a standard notebook. The potential applications of this algorithm are also discussed in the study.