Earthquake Resistant Design of Shallow Foundations

The state of the art in the seismic design of shallow foundations is developing towards a rational, although still simplified, analysis. Sound, easy to use representations of the stiffness and damping of the soil foundation system can be provided to the structural engineer to perform the dynamic analysis of the structure when the system remains linear. The geotechnical engineer has at hand a theoretical framework to compute the seismic bearing capacity of foundations for which much progress has been achieved in the last decade leading to a rational, rigorous, approach. This bearing capacity is expressed in terms of a bounding surface defined by simple analytical formulae expressed in terms of dimensionless variables related to the inertial or kinematic loading parameters.