Ultimate bearing capacity of conical shell foundations

Shell foundations have been employed as an alternative for the conventional flat shallow foundations and have proven to provide economical advantage. They have shown considerably improved performance in terms of ultimate capacity and settlement characteristics. However, despite conical shell foundations are frequently used in industry, the theoretical solutions for bearing capacity of these footings are available for only triangular shell strip foundations. The benefits in design aspects can be achieved through theoretical solutions considering shell geometry. The engineering behavior of a conical shell foundation on mixed soils was investigated experimentally and theoretically in this study. The failure mechanism was obtained by conducting laboratory model tests. Based on that, the theoretical solution of bearing capacity was developed and validated with experimental results, in terns of the internal angle of the cone. In comparison to the circular flat foundation, the results show 15% increase of ultimate load and 51% decrease of settlement at an angle of intersection of 120 degrees. Based on the results, the design chart of modified bearing capacity coefficients for conical shell foundation is proposed.