Predicting the settlement of shallow foundations on sand using a shear hardening Mohr-Coulomb constitutive model

Obtaining reliable predictions of the settlement of shallow foundations on sand remains a challenging task for the geotechnical engineering profession. There appears to be no widely accepted method for this very common problem. The aim of this paper is to address this by presenting a soil model that is simple enough to be applied in routine engineering practice, but sophisticated enough to capture the important mechanical behaviour of sands relevant to the footing settlement problem. Emphasis is placed on the application of the model by presenting details of the process adopted for deriving model parameters prior to back analysing foundation load tests.