NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF LOAD-DISPLACEMENT BEHAVIOUR OF SKIRTED RAFT FOUNDATIONS

Skirted foundation is one of the new approaches for improving the performance of shallow raft foundation by using skirts to it. Skirted foundations are the shallow foundations in which the footing is reinforced by the addition of vertical plates or skirts. The improvement in performance of skirted foundation depends on the geometrical and structural properties of the skirt and footing such as shape, depth of the footing and skirt, skirt geometry etc.;soil characteristics namely index properties of soil and the interface conditions of the soil-skirt-foundation systems such as roughness and material of the skirt etc. In this study an attempt has been made to determine the behavior of surface raft with and without skirts and compare the bearing capacity and corresponding settlement in two soil model- Hardening soil model and Mohr-Coulomb model using a finite element software PLAXIS 3D.