Reliability Analyses at Ultimate and Serviceability Limit States of Obliquely Loaded Circular Foundations

This paper aims at determining the failure probability and the corresponding most predominant failure mode at both ultimate (ULS) and serviceability (SLS) limit states of a circular foundation resting on a (c, φ) soil and subjected to an inclined loading. The failure modes at ULS are the footing sliding and the soil punching while those at SLS are the exceedance of tolerable horizontal and vertical footing displacements. The probabilistic results based on the response surface methodology have shown that at both ULS and SLS, there is a load inclination where neither mode of failure is predominant. This inclination corresponds to the loading configurations situated on the line joining the origin and the maximal point of the interaction diagram. In a second stage, the results of a sensitivity analysis showing the effect of the different statistical parameters of the uncertain variables on the value of the failure probability were presented and discussed.