el PAOLUCCI AND PECKER derived which can be used for practical purposes. KINEMATIC APPROACH ‘The strip foundation in Fig. 1 is resting on a homogene- ous Mohr-Coulomb soil, with cohesion c and friction an- fle ¢. The width of the foundation is B. Under static con- ditions, the system is subjected to a vertical action V transmitted by the structure, the lateral overburden g, and the weight of the soil y=, The seismic excitation is assumed to be applied statically (pseudo-static approach). The structure transmits a horizontal action H to the foun- dation and an overturning moment M=V-e, e being the load eccentricity. In addition, the effect of the horizontal components of the body force in the soil (f.) and the lateral overburden (q,), due to the soil inertia, must be considered. In the presence of a significant vertical component of seismic excitation, the weight of the structure and of the soil should be multiplied by (1~K,), k, being the vertical seismic coefficient. For simplicity, this effect has been neglected herein, although it can be easily taken into ac- count. The set of loads acting on the foundation system can therefore be described by a 7-dimension load vector = {V, H, M, fy Sy Quy Gy}. The kinematic approach of the yield design theory (Salengon, 1990) provides an upper ‘bound for Q, i.e. determines the region of loads that will certainly cause the failure of the system. Several kinematic mechanisms were considered, in or- der to determine the best upper bound approximation for the limit load. These mechanisms are the extension to the Mohr-Coulomb material of those developed by Salencon and Pecker (1995 a, b) for a Tresca material. We will illus- trate here the most significant ones. ‘The kinematic mechanism shown in Fig. 2, referred to as Mec and also described in Dormieux and Pecker (1995), is of the Prandtl type and is defined by the two ge- ometric parameters a and 4. AJD and DKL are trian- gular rigid blocks, whereas DJK is a deformable block bounded by a logarithmic spiral centered in D and de- scribed by DM=DJ-e"**, The velocity field Uis defined in each zone as follows: AID: U is uniform (/U|=U) and perpendicular to Ds; —DIK: in a polar reference system with center D, U is represented by the following expression: 0 =Ue™, U(r, 8) wo thus its value is constant along any line DM, M being a generic point on the log-spiral DJ, and it is perpendicu- lar to =DKL: U is uniform (| U1 = dicular to DK. ‘The kinematic mechanism shown in Fig. 3, referred to as Mec2, consists of a rigid block IID, bounded by the foundation on the upper side and by a logarithmic spiral U-e8-«- %¢ and perpen- ‘Mobe-Couomb sil ee Fig. 1. Shallow foundation on a homogeneous Mobr-Coulomb soll Fig. 2, Kinematic mechanism Mecl, defined by two geometric rameters a and Fig. 3. Kinematic mechanism Mec2, Parameters 2, Py cand yt defined by four geometric centered in @ on the lower side, of a deformable block DJK defined by a logarithmic spiral centered in D, and of a triangular deformable block DKL. The geometry of Mec? is determined completely by four parameters: a, , 4 and . The friction angle atthe soil-foundation inter- face is 5. The velocity field U is defined in each zone as follows: —IJD: the motion consists of a rigid rotation around 2 with angular velocity «2. —DIK: in a polar reference with center D, U's given by: 0 10 Oy, =a(aDer™—r) ®SEISMIC BEARING CAPACITY 97 —DKL: denoting by Ma generic point along DK and by ‘M.Mza segment parallel to KL, the velocity field is con- stant along MM: and forms an angle ¢ with the KL. direction. The absolute value of the velocity at the ‘generic point Mz inside DKL is given by: U(M)=e(@De*"- ™*—DM,) @ ‘The velocity field across the boundary between zones DIK and DKL is continuous, as can be seen from (2) and ) by setting r=DM,, 6=x—a—m and recalling that U(M)=UML). It should be noted that the introduction of the parameter 2 allows the taking into account of the possi- ble uplift of the foundation in the presence of strong load ‘eccentricities. Generally, in the case of zero or low eccen- tricity, the limit values provided by Mec! and Mec? tend to coincide. The kinematic mechanisms proposed in the literature (Sarma and lossifelis, 1990; Budhu and Al- Karni, 1993) are also of the Prandtl type, but do not take into account the effects of eccentricity. As a rule, Mec2 was found to give the best upper bound results; thus, the solutions that will be shown in the following have been obtained using this mechanism. ‘The application of the kinematic approach of the yield design theory leads to the necessary condition of stabil- ity: P=(Q, ¥, U)sP™(¥, U) “ where P* is the power of the external forces and P™ the maximum power of the resisting forces; Wis a vector con- taining the geometric parameters of the kinematic mechanism. The analytical expressions of P™(Q, ¥, U) and P™(, U) for MecI and Mec2 are given in Appen- dix L ‘The upper bound of the external load Q was found by the following procedure: —the only load variable is the horizontal action H; the other 6 load components which define @ are assumed to be given; —applying the necessary condition (4), the following ine- can be derived (see (A.4) and (A.9) in Appen- HOV, €, fof Gn In ) () —a minimization algorithm of the simplex type was ap- plied to find the minimum value of and the corre- sponding geometric parameters (i.e. « and u for Mec!; a, u, 2 and f for Mec2). VALIDATION OF THE METHOD. Bearing Capacity Factors ‘A first validation of the results of the kinematic ap- proach was provided by the static approach of yield de- sign theory. The construction of statically admissible stress fields gives an indication of the quality of the kinematic solution. This approach, which has not been reported herein for simplicity, was followed by Salengon and Josseron (1994) who have proven that in the case of a centered, inclined load the kinematic mechanism Mect provides an upper bound which practically coincide with the lower bound of the static approach. ‘The results of the present kinematic approach were then compared with the classic solutions for the ultimate bearing capacity (q,) of a shallow foundation under verti- cal loads. As is well known, this is usually calculated from the superposition formula: 1 =e-NA0)+ Gy Nd@)+5 YBN) o where: Ny=e"*-tan? (45°+9/2) 6) N=(N,-l cot d (6) ‘The theoretical values of N;(¢) may be calculated by clas- sical methods of the theory of plasticity (Lundgren and Mortensen, 1953). Whereas the N, and N. values ob- tained by the present approach coincide with those given by (), the Ny values exceed the theoretical ones, up to ~70-80% (Fig. 4). As a reference, the N, values prescribed by Eurocode 7 (1994) are also shown in Fig. 4. It should be noted however, that the present N, values practically coincide with those found by other authors (Sarma and Tossifelis, 1990; Budhu and Al-Karni, 1993), ‘who used essentially the same Prandtl-type mechanism. Comparison with Static Finite Element Analyses ‘The results of the present method were compared with those obtained by numerical analyses carried out using the nonlinear finite element code DYNAFLOW (Prevost, 1993). A rigid strip foundation, 4 m wide, was consid- ered, founded on a homogeneous Drucker-Prager soil with unit weight y=15 KN/m’, The parameters of the model were chosen so that the Drucker-Prager failure criterion coincides in plane strain conditions with the Mohr-Coulomb one (Chen and Liu, 1990), with cohesion c=80 kPa and friction angle ¢=30°. The soil-founda- tion interface was modeled by frictional joint elements with angle J= 15°. The flow rule is associated, to allow a direct comparison with the results of the kinematic ap- roach. ‘The velocity fields at failure were calculated using the 30? 101 £7: 2(N—1Ntang Plasticity ‘Theory Kinematié approach 108 2 28 30 35 40 45 # (deg) Fig. 4. Comparison of diferent evaluations of the 1, factor