Soil structure interaction of circular footings on layered soil: first results

摘要

Civilisation and migration result to the exploration of new construction areas to meet the needs of society for housing and other infrastructure and lifelines. Due to diminishing resources, problematic sites in terms of geotechnics are increasingly used for construction. In an Alpine environment these problematic sites are often located in deposits of former glacial lakes. Due to glacial and postglacial sedimentary deposition processes, soil frequently consists of layers of granular materials of varying elevation and soft clays. The uncertainty in design of geotechnical structures on those soil strata leads to the use of high factors of safety in the design work. It is obvious, that the design methods in use do not comply with reality. For example the method of calculating the ultimate limit state is not suitable for the specific circumstances of layered soil strata. Also, well-known stress distribution assumptions are valid for the homogeneous half space only and little is known about the background of determining the serviceability state. In consequence only rough assumptions are being done and a resulting design will be too safe and thus expensive - or even worse - failure occurs.