Abstract
In this paper, nonlinear springs and linear under-soil are supposed to model the nonlinear behavior of soil lying under the vertically loaded circular plate. The analysis procedure using this model is introduced. Dozens of loading test data are used to get estimation of elastic soil modulus for the analysis. The characteristics of nonlinear springs for each kind of soil are also discussed on the basis of relations between load and settlement from the field test data. Settlements of circular plate calculated by proposed analysis model are compared with the test results. The settlements calculated are in good agreement with the measured, except that a few calculations show big difference between calculation and test at higher load levels. This difference may be caused by neglect of local shear failure in analysis of this paper. This defect should be improved in future study for the proposed analysis model.
