Reliability Study of Consolidation and Settlement Calculations for Foundations

Based on statistics,the reliabilities in settlement calculations resulted from the soil parameters uncertainty can be analyzed by Taylor series. As a case study,the computations of consolidation settlement of clay and settlement of footings on sand using theoretical or empirical formula were evaluated by Taylor series with different methods of estimating standard deviations to find a probability of failure,which could be usually used to imply that the ultimate settlement could be larger than the calculated settlement.It was practically simple to apply the Taylor series to the settlement calculations reliability analyses if a reasonable settlement ratio was found.