The paper aims to study the flexural response of the foundation of a surface reservoir resting on a dense granular foundation bed overlying a weak clay layer with the reinforcement possessing sufficient bending stiffness placed at their interface. The footing and reinforcement are idealized as free-ended beams. The overlying compacted granular layer and the underlying clay layer are idealized respectively by Winkler Springs and four-element standard visco-elastic Burger model. A quadratic variation of the subgrade modulus is assumed along the length of the footing at the soil-structure interface with the corresponding maximum value being at the centre and progressively decreasing to minimum at the edges. The resulting differential equations are discretized by using Finite Difference Method (FDM), and the set of linear equations so obtained is solved by Gauss-Seidel iterative technique. Studies were carried out to obtain the optimal element size for convergent solution and establish its correctness by comparing the same with available solutions. Parametric studies to find the effect of time, relative stiffness and viscosity, interface friction and the distribution of subgrade reaction on the flexural behavior of the footing are also reported here.
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