An analytical approach for estimating the bearing capacity of slopes under loading on the upper surface

Abstract

Bearing capacity plays a significant role in evaluating the safety of the foundations rest on the slope. Many solutions have been proposed to assess the ultimate bearing capacity of the foundation adjacent to the slope, however, the available analytical and empirical methods are associated with some shortcomings in view of slope material properties and geometry. Also, numerical methods suffer from rigorous computational effort, and the accuracy of the outcome depends on the mesh and boundary effect. Therefore, a new analysis is employed in this research work that is able to consider all the effective parameters on the evaluation of ultimate bearing capacity. The results are compared with the existing numerical one in the literature and show good agreements. Also, in order to facilitate the use of the proposed method a Mathematica package code has been proposed to help the researcher to evaluate the bearing capacity of a shallow foundation that rests on the slope.