Bucket foundation has been used extensively in offshore facilities to resist combined lateral and moment loading. The lateral loading capacity and interaction between the soil and foundation is of great interest to geotechnical engineers. In this paper, finite element models of a bucket foundation with two aspect ratios {LID, where L is the skirt length and D is the foundation diameter) of 0.5, 1.33, were created using the ABAQUS program. Centrifuge model tests were also conducted on the two models. The load-displacement curves of the numerical analysis and test results had good agreement, which verified the reliability of the finite element analysis method for this type of problem. In addition, several 3D numerical models of aspect ratio varied from 0.2 to 2.0 were built to evaluate the effect of the aspect ratio on the lateral loading capacity. The development and distribution of stress and plastic strain were used to study the failure mechanism of bucket foundation for different LID ratios. The influence of the position of the lateral load applied was analyzed. Sensitivity analysis for the parameters of material properties such as the internal friction angle, the Young's Modulus, and the friction coefficient between the bucket and soil were performed using non-linear analysis with the Mohr-Coulomb soil model.
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