Abstract
There are well-established procedures for assessing the combined horizontal and vertical load capacity of isolated, shallow-depth pad foundations. However, when the pads act together in an interconnected group, as they do, for example, under an offshore platform, some of them may be unloading whilst the loads increase on others. How the pads in such groups respond to a monotonically increasing horizontal load up to failure; how their diameter and spacing might best be assessed for specific design loads; how their safety, with respect to load, might be improved by shallow-depth burial and how things change if the horizontal load is not distributed equally between the pads, are less well understood questions. The paper presents a simple, new methodology for investigating these problems together with numerical examples of its application.
