Bearing Capacity of Cohesive Soils with Strength Anisotropy

Natural in-situ clay deposits display fabric anisotropy due to parallel alignment of their peds. The fabric anisotropy may have considerable influence on the mechanical properties of clay. Some experimental investigations on the above mentioned influence have been already done for the saturated alluvial Ariake clay under three dimensional stress condition with true tri-axial testing apparatus. Presented here in is an analytical study of the influence of the strength anisotropy on the bearing capacity of the Ariake clay under plane strain condition. A bearing capacity has been calculated for both circuler and complex slip plane which consists active and passive linear slip planes and logarithmic spiral slip plane. As the results of the calculations,this paper designates that the cohesive soils with strength anisotropy reduces the bearing capacity comparative with strength isotropy