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Advancing Settlement Prediction Methods for Shallow Foundations on Sands to Enhance Climate-Resilient Infrastructure
Conference paper

Advancing Settlement Prediction Methods for Shallow Foundations on Sands to Enhance Climate-Resilient Infrastructure

Abdullah Maarafi and Miguel A. Pando
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Sustainability: Developments and Innovations Vol 2, pp 247-256
04 Jul 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-92-1726-7_24
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Abstract

Climate resilience Elastic settlement Equivalent-linear secant stiffness Shallow foundations Soil non-linearity Soil-structure-interaction
Analysis of shallow foundations of sands is a classical soil-structure-interaction (SSI) problem in soil mechanics that has received ample attention over the last several decades. This SSI problem involves bearing capacity and settlement calculations, the present paper focuses on the latter. Accurate estimations of settlements of shallow footings are crucial for improved climate resilience of infrastructure for several reasons, including: (i) prevent structural damage such as cracking, tilting, damage; (ii) prevent reduction of lifespan or increase of maintenance costs; and (iii) improved resilient design through more reliable estimates to ensure redundancy and functionality after extreme events. This paper highlights the above for the specific problem of elastic settlement of shallow foundations on sands. Over the years there have been several international prediction competition events where industry and academia experts have made settlement predictions of shallow foundation on well-characterized test sites, and despite being a classical SSI problem the predictions from experts continue to show great variability and often do not match field measurements. This lack of accuracy and observed large variability has been associated with the methodology used for the estimates, inherent spatial variability of soil properties, but above all to the challenges associated to adequately capturing soil nonlinearity of the foundation soils and the selection of a suitable secant soil stiffness (Es) to approximate soil behavior as an equivalent linear if using elastic methods.. In this paper we review commonly used methods for settlement predictions of shallow foundations on sands and discuss in detail the sources of uncertainty and provide recommendations on how to improve reliability and resilience of settlements of shallow foundations on sands.

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