Consolidation beneath Circular Skirted Foundations

The effect of foundation embedment on consolidation has not been considered previously in a systematic manner, although this is of particular interest for offshore foundations, where embedment is provided by skirts that enclose a compressible soil plug. For skirted foundations, critical uncertainties include what to assume in terms of the degree of drainage at skirt tip level, and the relative time scales of consolidation within the soil plug and beneath the foundation. In this paper, results from small strain finite-element analyses are used to quantify the immediate and time-dependent response of circular skirted foundations to uniaxial vertical loading. Foundations with frictionless and fully rough skirt-soil interfaces with varying ratio of embedment depth to foundation diameter are considered and the responses compared with those for surface foundations. The findings show that both skirt-soil interface roughness and embedment ratio have a significant effect on the consolidation response.