Undrained Bearing Capacity of Two Strip Footings on a Spatially Variable Soil with Linearly Increasing Mean Strength.

A probabilistic study on the bearing capacity of two parallel strip footings on a spatially variable soil where the mean of undrained shear strength increased linearly with depth was performed. For the comparative purpose, the single footing case was also investigated. Stationary and nonstationary random fields obeying log-normal distribution of undrained shear strength were generated and further mapped into nonlinear finite-element analysis. Monte Carlo simulations were then performed to evaluate the bearing capacity for the selected ranges of the degree of nonstationarity and the spatial correlation length in undrained shear strength. The normalized bearing capacities derived from two different random field models for the cases of single and two footings were compared, and the effect of footing interference was also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]