Stress distrubitions in cohesionless soils for plain strain conditions

Nowadays, one of most frequently encountered problems in the field of geotechnical engineering is that how much additional stresses will emerge in soil medium due to external loads applied on soil surface. That is why, these additional stresses are the most important data used to determine amount of settlement and displacement of soil or design buried structures. In this study, primarily several tests were carried out in plane strain conditions with model strip footing in cohesionless soil and the vertical stress increments occurred in the soil medium due to applied vertical surface loads were determined at several specific locations. In experimental studies, sand was placed in layers in a tank withsix different relative densities and additional vertical stress increments were measured bystrain gauges placedat predetermined locations.Also vertical stress increments were obtained numerically for different material models by modelling the experimental setup with ANSYS which analyses on basis of finite element method. These experimental and numerical results were compared and discussed with various results obtained from different analytical methods based on Theory of Elasticity. As the findings obtained from these studies were examined, it was understood that relative density is an effective parameter for stress distribution in soils. However, since the existing analytical and numerical solutions don?t take into account this parameter and don?t have realistic assumptions for the soil material properties, there are significant differences between the experimental results and the analytical or numerical results.