Abstract
In order to investigate the bearing capacity of a strip footing on soft clay with a surface crust and the deformations, a series of loading tests was performed. Model clay layers were made by combining consolidation on the lab floor with centrifuge consolidation. Based on observations in the experiments, an upper bound mechanism was proposed. As a result, it was found that the bearing capacity tends to increase with an increase in the strength of the crust and the deformations concentrate along the boundary between the crust and the underlying clay layer. It was also found that the proposed failure mechanism could give a reasonable prediction of the bearing capacity for this type of soils.
