Undrained Uniaxial Capacities of Suction Bucket Foundations in Rows

Abstract

Suction bucket foundations in rows, sunk by self-weight and passive suction, can be used as footings of breakwater, trestle bridge, offshore cofferdam and other structures, and they have a fine application prospect on soft soil for their advantages of good bearing capacities, simple construction, low investment, being reusable and so forth. A large number of finite-element models for suction bucket foundations in undrained soft clay were established to investigate uniaxial capacities of suction bucket foundations, and the effects of foundations spacing ratio, embedment ratio and soil shear strength were studied. The results show that foundations spacing ratio has certain effect on the uniaxial capacities of a suction bucket foundation but is less influential than other factors; embedment ratio and soil shear strengths have more influence on the uniaxial bearing capacities and failure mechanisms of bucket foundation. Based on these results, simplified formulae are proposed to predict uniaxial capacities of suction bucket foundations in rows for designers to use directly.