Modeling of bearing capacity of footings on sand within stochastic micro-polar hypoplasticity

The effect of the initial distribution of void ratio on strength and shear localization in problems of footings on sand at laboratory scale was numerically analyzed. To describe a mechanical behavior of a cohesionless granular material during a monotonic deformation path, a micro-polar hypoplastic constitutive model was used. The initial void ratios took the form of correlated random spatial fields described by both symmetric and non-symmetric random distributions using a homogeneous correlation function. The field realizations were obtained with the help of an original conditional rejection method of generation. Only few representative samples of the random fields selected from the generated set were taken into account in the numerical calculations. The stochastic results were compared with deterministic ones performed with a uniform distribution of initial void ratio. In addition, the effect of the range of correlation was investigated. Finally, a size effect was calculated with three different footing widths. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.