Citation:
Abstract:
During the last decade, the construction sector in Algeria has been in constant development with higher demands for urban lands. This has resulted in placing building foundations in closer proximities with potential impact on the bearing capacity and settlements. Moreover, there have been limited investigations on the interference and overlapping effects on the ultimate bearing capacity of closely placed footings. This work explains the numerical investigation of the interference effect of juxtaposed strip footings based on a bilayer granular soil. A numerical model, based on the finite element method, was developed using Plaxis Package. The influence of spacing between foundations, friction angle, Young's modulus and thickness of the first layer on the efficiency factor ξγ were examined. The obtained results show clearly that the efficiency factor depends significantly on the thickness and strength of the first layer.