New Medium-Scale Laboratory Testing of Bucket Foundation Capacity in Sand

This article presents a new testing rig for axially loaded bucket foundations. The medium-scale physical model gives the ability to examine the influence of axial tensile, compressive as well as cyclic loading on bucket foundations subjected to various levels of overburden stress. The properties of the test set-up allow long-term examination with more than 40 000 cycles. Tests can be done with specimens of up to one meter in diameter and one meter in skirt length. The overburden pressure can be as large as 70 kPa using a tight latex membrane which covers the specimen and the soil surface. In addition to the description of the rig, results from several monotonic tensile tests are presented