Shallow Foundation I: Ultimate Bearing Capacity 489

The sinking of Zone I creates two zones of plastic equilibrium, II and III, on either side of the
footing. Zone II is the radial shear zone whose remote boundaries bd and a/meet the horizontal
surface at angles (45° - 0/2), whereas Zone III is a passive Rankine zone. The boundaries de and/g
of these zones are straight lines and they meet the surface at angles of (45° - 0/2). The curved parts
cd and cf in Zone II are parts of logarithmic spirals whose centers are located at b and a
respectively.

Ultimate Bearing Capacity of Soil

Strip Footings
Terzaghi developed his bearing capacity equation for strip footings by analyzing the forces acting
on the wedge abc in Fig. 12.6. The equation for the ultimate bearing capacity qu is

where Qult = ultimate load per unit length of footing, c = unit cohesion, /the effective unit weight of
soil, B = width of footing, D,= depth of foundation, Nc, Nq and Ny are the bearing capacity factors.
They are functions of the angle of friction, 0.
The bearing capacity factors are expressed by the following equations

Nq =
2 cos2 (45°+0/2)
where: aa~ = er>**
= <? / tan n
7 «*. *, n = (Q.75n:-d/2)
(12.7)
Nvr =-
2

where Kp = passive earth pressure coefficient

Table 12.1 gives th(
the values of Nr, N and N for various values of 0 and Fig. 12.7 gives the
same in a graphical form.

Table 12.1 Bearing capacity factors of Terzaghi

0° NC N NY
0 5.7 1.0 0.0
5 7.3 1.6 0.14
10 9.6 2.7 1.2
15 12.9 4.4 1.8
20 17.7 7.4 5.0
25 25.1 12.7 9.7
30 37.2 22.5 19.7
35 57.8 41.4 42.4
40 95.7 81.3 100.4
45 172.3 173.3 360.0
50 347.5 415.1 1072.8