Foundations may undergo severe distress during an earthquake. One such example of foundation failure involving toppling of apartment blocks due to liquefaction during the 1964 Niigata Earthquake is presented in Figure 1. Earthquake effects on shallow and deep foundations are accounted for by designing them structurally to provide necessary strength and ensure serviceability. Strength considerat...

Foundation design must satisfy limited values of settlement. Settlement is an essential criterion in the design process of shallow foundations. To calculate the settlement under different types of shallow foundations, 79 samples were taken from twenty-three sites distributed in three regions: Mosul, Baghdad and Basrah in the northern, central and southern parts of Iraq. Field and laboratory tes...

Proper estimation of foundation settlement is a crucial factor in designing shallow foundations. Recent literature shows the applicability of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in predicting the settlement of shallow foundations. However, conventional ANNs have some drawbacks: getting trapped in local minima and a slow rate of learning. Utilization of an optimization algorithm such as Particle S...

 Choosing appropriate foundations for supporting offshore wind turbines is one of the uncertainties in the future rounds of offshore wind power development. Offshore wind turbines are dynamically sensitive structures as the global natural frequency of the whole system is very close to the forcing frequencies (due to the environmental loads and the associated frequencies due to the rotor). This...

There is a growing interest world-wide in the development of a rational reliability-based geotechnical design code. The reason for this interest is a least two-fold; first of all, geotechnical engineers face uncertainties which are commonly significantly larger than those faced in other fields of engineering and so there is a need to properly characterize and deal with this uncertainty. Secondl...