Proposed Correlation to Evaluate the Bearing Capacity of a Two-Layered Ground

Variety of the geometry and parameters of soil shear strength, and uncertainties in predicting failure mechanism have complicated evaluation of the bearing capacity of non-homogeneous layered soil in geotechnical engineering. Many researchers have done extensive research in this field and have introduced practical and acceptable computational methods. But most of the aforementioned studies were conducted on two-layered purely cohesive or frictional soils. In this study, a new correlation is proposed to evaluate the bearing capacity of a strip footing located on the two cohesive-frictional layered soil based on observations from 12 sets of physical models, numerical analysis corresponding to experiments and previous research. A series of parametric studies was performed to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed correlation using PLAXIS 2D finite element software. To this end, the values of the ultimate bearing capacity (q(ult)) obtained from both numerical and theoretical methods for 56 different models were compared. A comparison of the results shows that the proposed correlation can evaluate the ultimate bearing capacity for various states of the strip footing on the two-layered ground with relatively good accuracy, which could be reliable.