Progressive failure of a cement-treated ground in bearing capacity problem

Analysis of the undrained bearing capacity of a cement-treated ground was carried out using GEOASIA (Asaoka et al. 1994; Noda et al. 2008), a soil-water skeleton coupled finite deformation analysis code, which incorporates the SYS Cam-clay model (Asaoka et al. 2000, 2002), an elasto-plastic constitutive equation that is capable of describing changes in the soil skeleton structure. The results reproduced the deformation of the ground, which consisted of brittle material, with slip lines (areas of strain localization) sequentially extending from the edge of the foundation, leading to failure. At the same time, each element on the slip lines gradually softened, so even though the ground consisted of brittle soil, it was found that the material properties were not reflected in the overall load-settlement relationship.