Abstract:
With a rapid growth of population in developing countries like Ethiopia, the constructions
of residential and commercial developments are booming in urban areas. New
developments are constructed adjacent to existing structures and even on difficult sloping
or hilly terrains at the outskirts of urban areas due to limited land resource. In practice, the
conventional bearing capacity equation is used to design shallow foundations. The
conventional equation is expressed as the summation of three terms which are namely
cohesion term, base width term or friction term, and depth term. The conventional equation
fairly predicts the bearing capacity of footing on simple ground and load conditions. For
cases of inclined load and/or sloping ground, the conventional equation is modified with
modification factors which are simplified semi-analytical equations and have certain
limitations. Despite the existing studies, the improvement of the semi-analytical
modification factors to overcome their limitations and better predict the actual bearing
capacity of footing on slope remains an active research area in the geotechnical engineering
field. Ayalew (2021) carried out series of numerical simulations of footings on and adjacent
to ground slopes but limited to only footings on ground surface without embedment. Thus,
he was able to propose improved ground slope modification factors only for cohesion term
and friction term. In this research, Ayalew’s (2021) numerical simulation study was
extended for footings with embedment depth. The simulations were carried out for pure
cohesive soil in undrained condition and pure cohesionless soil in drained condition for
various combinations of slope angle, setback distance, cohesion, angle of internal friction
and embedment depth. The simulation results from this research were used to propose
improved ground slope modification factor for depth term. For the cases considered in this
study, it was obtained that the effect of slope on the failure mechanism and bearing capacity
of a square footing diminishes beyond a critical setback distance to footing width ratio of
2.5. The proposed improved ground slope modification factor for depth term was compared
with the existing modification factors in literature in predicting the simulations data. The
proposed model shows significant improvement in predicting both the trend and values of
the simulations data in this research.
Keywords: Square footing, Bearing capacity, Slope, Modification factor, 3D numerical
model, Plaxis3D,