Upper-bound method for calculating bearing capacity of strip footings on two-layer soils

Limit analysis methods have been widely used in the stability analysis of geotechnical problems.A significant number of research papers has been published to study the application of the upper-bound method to bearing capacity calculations in homogeneous soils,and it has been demonstrated that the upper-bound method is highly effective.In practice,the need to determine the bearing capacity of multilayered soils arises frequently,especially a two layer foundation system.However,there is still not sufficient research conducted on the determination of the bearing capacity of a two-layer foundation soil.A new multi-block upper-bound method was presented herein to calculate the bearing capacity of two-layer foundation soils and calculation of the kinematical velocity fields was discussed.In order to verify the effectiveness of the method several numerical examples are discussed and calculated the results were compared with those of other methods.