Load-Displacement Behaviour of Skirted Raft Foundations on sand using PLAXIS 2D

Skirted foundations are the shallow foundations in which the footing is reinforced by the addition of vertical plates or skirts. Skirted foundation is one of the new approaches for improving the performance of shallow raft foundation by using skirts to it. 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 the present work an attempt has been made to determine the behaviour of surface raft with and without skirts under two different soil model- Hardening soil model and Mohr-Coulomb model using a finite element software PLAXIS 2D. The analytical results show that with the increase in skirt depth, the bearing capacity increases and settlement decreases for both the model