Response of Isolated Shallow Footing on Sloping Ground with Dynamic Loading

With rapid urbanization in hilly areas, construction near slopes has become an unavoidable situation. As a consequence of faulty design and awareness every year, considerable numbers of slope failures are taking place, causing economic losses, and, in some worse cases, loss of lives as well. Ensuring the stability of slope has always been a challenging task for a geotechnical engineer, especially in an area where dynamic forces like earthquakes are frequent. Given above, the present study aims to investigate the effect of the earthquake on the stability of building constructed on a slope with varying configurations. The study assumed different variables, such as distances between footing and slope, earthquake magnitude, and slope geometry. A set of 16 square isolated footings are considered for the study placed at a distance of 2, 4, and 6 m from the slope. Different slope heights such as 3 m, 6 m, and 9 m, each associated with different slope-angles such as 26.56° (2H:1V), 33.7° (1.5H:1V), 45° (1H:1V), and 63.4° (0.5H:1V), are taken into account. This numerical study is performed on Palxis^3D. In the analysis, the earthquake force is applied in terms of pseudo-static acceleration, ranged between 0.1 and 0.6 g. The stability of slopes is evaluated in terms of the factor of safety computed by the “strength reduction technique”. In this method, the strength characteristics of soil are reduced by a factor until the loss of stability and/or failure of structure occurs. The reciprocal of the reduction factor is identified as the factor of safety associated with the soil model under investigation.